Zabbix Team is pleased to announce the release of Zabbix 5.0 LTS. It comes with a list of significant improvements in usability, security, and integrity.
The main strategy the Zabbix team follows is to make Zabbix as available as possible. An open-source and free monitoring solution, Zabbix can now be deployed on-premise and in the cloud. It is available on the latest releases of platforms, containers, and Linux distros from RedHat/IBM, SuSE, Ubuntu. Now one-click Zabbix deployment is also available on Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM/RedHat Cloud, Oracle, and Digital Ocean. Zabbix technical support services are now offered at Red Hat and Azure Marketplaces.
Moreover, the Zabbix monitoring tool provides numerous out-of-the-box integrations with messengers, ticketing, and alerting systems. The new release expands the list of supported services and applications that can be monitored effortlessly.
But let’s dive into some core features of the new release.
Zabbix 5.0 introduces significant improvements for much more secure monitoring
The new version supports HTTP Proxy for webhooks that allows making connections from Zabbix Server to external alerting and ITSM systems more secure and controlled. It supports blacklists and whitelists for metrics on agent-side and encrypted connections to MySQL and PostgreSQL backends. It is now possible to configure ciphers for all Zabbix components to avoid using non-secure ciphers for TLS connections. Strong SHA256 allows keeping hashes of user passwords. Zabbix 5.0 supports secret user macros for keeping any sensitive information like passwords and API tokens that you do not want to be exposed to end-users.
The scalability and performance were also improved
Zabbix 5.0 supports optional compression of collected data for TimescaleDB. In addition to general TimescaleDB advantages (automatic partitioning, performance, and scalability) it also helps to even more improve performance and lower storage costs.
Next-generation Zabbix Agent got an officially supported status in Zabbix 5.0.
The new agent offers a wide range of new capabilities and advanced monitoring functions for Linux and Windows. Note that the existing Zabbix agent will still be supported.
SAML authentication for single sign-on
SAML is used to provide a single point of authentication at a secure identity provider, meaning that user credentials never leave the firewall boundary, and then SAML is used to assert the identity to Zabbix and other applications. Support of SAML allows having out-of-the-box integration of Zabbix with various on-premise and cloud identity providers like Microsoft ADFS, OpenAM, SecureAuth, Okta, Auth0, and many others.
Zabbix 5.0 released with tons of usability and automation improvements
The new release is optimized for wide screens and also introduces support for 3rd party UI modules among other enhancements of Zabbix UI.
Zabbix became even more flexible
The extended functionality was added into Zabbix 5.0: triggers support operations with text data; support of host macros for host prototypes; support of Float64 data type. Zabbix now supports the override for low-level discovery (LLD) which helps to create smarter templates
Automation and discovery
The new Zabbix version comes with improved automation functionality. Automated discovery of hardware components, Windows-related resources, and advanced discovery of Java metrics have been added into the new release.
New and updated training courses, enterprise support upgraded
Along with major improvements, Zabbix 5.0 LTS release comes with updates and support for Zabbix professional training courses. Zabbix LLC offers a range of in-depth training courses helping users to advance their knowledge of the Zabbix monitoring solution. Zabbix 5.0 LTS release brings changes to current Zabbix training programs, which now include information about new release features and will be provided until the next LTS release. Zabbix team also introduces one-day remote training courses to deepen users’ knowledge of the specific fields – Zabbix API, Zabbix pre-processing, Zabbix Automation & Discovery, Zabbix Visualize IT!, Zabbix Performance Optimization, Zabbix SNMP, SNMP traps, IMPI. A full overview of available courses can be found on the Zabbix website.
Explore Zabbix 5.0 in detail!
Zabbix 5.0 is an LTS (Long Term Support) version with 5 years of official support. It combines innovation and stability and includes time-tested features, introduced in the non-LTS releases of Zabbix 4.2 and 4.4, which makes it a great choice for large-scale enterprise environments.
Take a deeper look at the release in the What’s new in Zabbix 5.0 section.
Read the official documentation.
We have upgraded our monitoring servers and proxies to Zabbix 5.0 and as always the upgrade was seamless. Delighted to see new features ( Agent2, TimescaleDB compression ) and templates ( IPMI ) .