New Zabbix 5.4

New and long-awaited Zabbix 5.4, has been just released today. New version of the most advanced monitoring platform comes with many improvements. We are most pleased with regular PDF reports, even more sophisticated problem detection and advanced data aggregation.

But there is much more news, let’s introduce the most interesting ones

• Regular PDF reports. The new Zabbix 5.4 can generate and send customized reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It is up to you how often you transform your Zabbix dashboard into the most useful report for you. The only requirement to access this feature is your own user account.

• Advanced data aggregation. Zabbix capabilities have been expanded to support selecting metrics by host groups, metric wildcards (*), and tags. This makes data aggregation easier for capacity planning, business-level monitoring and problem detection. For simplicity, the existing aggregated metrics functionality has been merged into calculated metrics.
  
  Zabbix now uses the same syntax for both triggers and calculated metrics.

• Improved visualizations. Zabbix 5.4 offers unification of functions for screens and dashboards and introduces support for multi-page dashboards and automatic switching between pages using a slideshow. Now you only need one platform to visualize all your data.

• Improved vizualizations. Zabbix 5.4 offers unification of functions for screens and dashboards and introduces support for multi-page dashboards and automatic switching between pages using a slideshow. Now you only need one platform to visualize all your data.

• API tokens for secure integration. Support for named API tokens with a clearly defined expiration date helps to easily and securely integrate Zabbix with third-party systems. A new user role controls who can create API tokens.

• More space for tags. Zabbix 5.4 drops support for applications on a host level and replaces them with tags, which are now supported for all critical objects in Zabbix: templates, hosts, host prototypes, triggers, metrics, and events.

• Easy template management. Each template item has a unique ID to help make updates to the template in a secure manner. When importing a new template, Zabbix will clearly notify you of the difference between the new and existing template.
  
  You can keep templates in a Git repository and push them to Zabbix using the Zabbix API in case of any updates.

• Improved scalability. Zabbix server and Proxy no longer require a connection to the database for polling processes, which saves CPU resources and speeds up the entire monitoring process.
  
  Zabbix server introduces cache support for trend data. This function significantly improves the performance of triggers that work with trend data.
  
  Newly, Zabbix Server performs an “elegant” startup to evenly distribute the processing of large amounts of data coming from proxy servers.
  
  The performance of the Zabbix server has been improved by reducing the load on the “history syncer” process during large parallel loads, e.g. when bulk sending of historical data from the Zabbix proxy.

• Local value mapping. Global value mapping has been deprecated and replaced with in-device or template mapping for better template usability, template independence, and better layering of mappings.
  
  So now we have templates with all the necessary information and we don’t need to do an extra task of importing or exporting value mapping, because it is now part of any template or host export.
  
  Value maps now also support value ranges and regular expressions for better flexibility.

• New integrations. Zabbix 5.4 is natively integrated with these solutions: iTOP, VictorOps, Rocket.Chat, Signal, Express.ms and others.

• New templates. In addition to existing templates, Zabbix 5.4 includes templates for monitoring APC UPS hardware, Hikvision cameras, etc., Hadoop, Zookeeper, Kafka, AMQ, HashiCorp Vault, MS Sharepoint, MS Exchange, smartclt, Gitlab, Jenkins, Apache Ignite and other applications and services.

We are preparing a webinar on the topic “Update to the latest version – Zabbix 5.4”.

All the news and changes did not fit into this article. But you will learn more about them in the webinar we are preparing. We will inform you about the date in time.

Zabbix download and other useful links

• Zabbix 5.4 can be downloaded here: www.zabbix.com/download

• There are many more new features, so we are adding a link where you can find them all together: https://www.zabbix.com/whats_new_5_4.
  And if you don’t want to do the work, contact us. We will be happy to introduce you to Zabbix 5.4.
• Complete documentation for the new version can be found here: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/5.4/manual/introduction/whatsnew540

As official partners and big fans of the Zabbix platform, we are able to provide you with services from all areas of Zabbix monitoring at the highest level. If you would be interested in a live demonstration of Zabbix installations at our customers, we will be happy to show you Zabbix in practice.