After having a brimming first day and an even more exciting night, the participants gathered their strength for another round of insightful talks, case studies and intriguing ideas, shared on the Zabbix conference.
This was the 5th time we all gathered together in Riga, and we must say it was the most impressive year by far. The spirit of the Zabbix Conference 2015 still lingers in the air, as we step into a new week at the office.
On the first official day of the conference the participants gathered excited at the registration from 9am sharp, already discussing the experiences and topics revolving around Zabbix.
There have been two types of graphs in Zabbix until now:
Simple ones were available for any numeric item, but could only display that one item. Custom graphs could have multiple items on them, but could only be created by users with administrator privileges.
Zabbix 2.4 adds a capability to graph any items on the same graph, at any time, by any user – essentially, creating ad-hoc graphs.
In the previous two blog articles we looked at really great improvements in Zabbix 2.4 to help with debugging/troubleshooting – ability to change loglevel for a running daemon (any sub-process, even) and various smaller validation and error reporting improvements. There is yet another improvement in this area, though – improved debugging capabilities for the built-in web and VMware monitoring for the cases when you really have to dig deep.
We already looked at one incredibly useful feature, available in 2.4 – ability to change log level while Zabbix daemons are running. Zabbix 2.4 also provides several other improvements that should help a lot with problem troubleshooting.
Historically, issues that might arise when using Zabbix have not been easy to troubleshoot. Not everything that would be useful is always logged. Log level can be increased, but those who still remember the first time they saw what DebugLevel=4 can do will understand why that option usually helped more advanced users. Besides, changing the log level required restart of the daemon, which in many cases would obscure the problem or introduce various other problems like delaying data on proxies in larger installations.
In what could be claimed to be one of the greatest improvements in 2.4 and maybe even beyond that, ability to change log level for a running daemon is coming.
In Zabbix versions before 2.4, notification (action) conditions were limited to three predefined options – “AND”, “OR”, “AND/OR”. Zabbix 2.4 adds a new option – Custom expression. This results in full freedom when deciding how all the different conditions should be handled.
Also known as that minor improvement some people just love. We already discussed most web monitoring related improvements for Zabbix 2.4, but there’s this one tiny thing left… an increase for the maximum URL length.
In these Zabbix 2.4 feature series we have already seen some improvements for the built-in web monitoring – the ability to specify custom headers and control redirects. Web monitoring got improved further – let’s explore the new options regarding SSL authentication. There are two of them:
- Verifying SSL certificates
- Supplying client certificate
Continuing with the improvements for the upcoming Zabbix 2.4, there are several improvements for the web monitoring. In previous versions Zabbix always followed redirects and retrieved the full page – now both of these things can be controlled.
Zabbix 2.4 is the upcoming major Zabbix version. While initially scheduled to be released in May 2014, it will be slightly delayed – Zabbix team is working hard, but there’s still a lot they would like to include in this release. While the new version is being baked, we can already start looking at the new features that will arrive with it. The first one will be a feature that Zabbix Conference 2013 participants voted on – multiple filters for the low level discovery.
Zabbix frontend is translated in many languages. For some, the coverage is great – 2.0.7 has been 100% translated in 9 languages. For some other translations the coverage is not that great… In preparation for Zabbix 2.2, there is a plan to remove translations below some threshold.
