Part 105: Zabbix 7.2 is almost out with 7.2.0rc2!

Zabbix 7.2 is almost out with its 7.2.0rc2 release so I today updated my dear What's up, home? environment to it. What possibly could go wrong with a release candidate version? 

Time to upgrade!

The upgrade was smooth and only took few moments even with my Raspberry Pi 4; in fact, even though it did touch the database a bit, or at least checked it for any needed changes, I guess there was not much to do as the migration part would have been unnoticable without me spying the zabbix_server.log file. About one second is nothing.

58006:20241128:220749.148 current database version (mandatory/optional): 07000000/07000015
58006:20241128:220749.154 starting automatic database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.165 completed 3% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.171 completed 6% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.201 completed 10% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.205 completed 13% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.255 completed 16% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.257 completed 20% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.261 completed 23% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.263 completed 26% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.265 completed 30% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.268 completed 33% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.270 completed 36% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.273 completed 40% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.275 completed 43% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.278 completed 46% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.280 completed 50% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.352 completed 53% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.361 completed 56% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.377 completed 60% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.423 completed 63% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.857 completed 66% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.864 completed 70% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.922 completed 73% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.959 completed 76% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220749.997 completed 80% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220750.001 completed 83% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220750.003 completed 86% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220750.041 completed 90% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220750.044 completed 93% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220750.046 completed 96% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220750.050 completed 100% of database upgrade
58006:20241128:220750.056 database upgrade fully completed
60576:20241128:221616.666 current database version (mandatory/optional): 07010029/07010029

After that, Zabbix was migrated, up and running. Two minor things happened to me, one of which is documented in upgrade notes for 7.2.0, and the other is just me not yet upgrading 3rd party modules (InitMAX). Apart from the following two minor details, not bad that a bigger version jump only takes a minute to happen.

Issue 1: Web UI wanted to change nginx.conf file a bit

Starting with Zabbix 7.2.0, the web UI bits and pieces can be found under /usr/share/zabbix/ui, instead of good old /usr/share/zabbix. If your Zabbix frontend throws you a scary red dialog telling you that the files you are looking for are in another castle, don't panic, remember to breathe. 

Underneath, your Zabbix server is just fine, it's only the web server that is pointing to wrong web root at this point. Fixing the path -- for me the dialog already told what to do -- made my precious Zabbix UI to come back to life.

Issue 2: Lazy Janne has yet to upgrade InitMAX modules, too

I have some InitMAX modules around, as previously I have blogged about their modules. With their 7.0 targeted modules in place, not all was well:

• Message of the day module had bad time while trying to access its datastore (which is just a text file in its module directory)
• ItemMAX and GaugeMAX modules prevented me editing any dashboard or adding any new widgets, as those caused the new widget selection dialog to load. I'm pretty sure this issue goes away as soon as I update these modules, too, for this blog post I did just disable the modules

But but... what's new?

Plenty! 

Host card widget

Tiny, yet useful visual improvement would be the new Host card widget. With it, you can show all kinds of details about any server as part of any of your dashboards.

Looks simple, but you can fiddle around freely with what you want to show about your servers by removing and adding the rows. Need to add some data like server manufacturer or model from the host inventory? Host tags? You got it. Let's edit this a bit and add some inventory fields:

... and it looks like this.

Top items widget

Similar to Top hosts widget, there's now Top items widget. No screeenshot of that yet from me, as I didn't yet test it. You know me, much of the time I blog while I do these things, this is as real-time as it gets. 

Fancy some sparkling?

Item value and Top hosts widgets just gained an option to enable sparklines to quickly see how the value has changed over time. So, for example my AdGuard Home dashboard now better shows if the numbers are changing slow or fast.

Similar visual fine-tuning here and there. Not miracles, but nice continuous evolution.

Subsystem support for ssh

With this enhancement to ssh item type, you get more freedom what you can do with the item. For example, it enables accessing certain networking gear over NETCONF for monitoring them through it, or to do more, like execute backup scripts. Kind of a big win already, but I'm sure that with the creativity of the whole Zabbix community, this can do wonders.

Low-level discovery scalability improvements

Earlier, low-level discovery had a limit of 30k dependent items. Starting with Zabbix 7.2, new LLD optimizations apparently work much faster and thus the 30k dependent items limit has been removed and Zabbix can perform discovery of two million items, triggers and graphs in reasonable time.

New templates, enhanced templates, bug fixes...

New Nutanix templates, new active agent templates, enhancements to Proxmox and VMware templates, there's a lot going on. Real soon now we'll have another great Zabbix release out from the oven! Thanks, Zabbix team!