r/zabbix

Hi everyone,
I’m planning a fresh Zabbix deployment and I’d like to ask for some practical opinions about using Zabbix 8.0 pre-release in a controlled semi-production setup.
At the moment, I already have a small Zabbix environment running on Zabbix 7.4.11. It originally started as a test system, but over time it became production-like. So far, upgrades from 7.2 to 7.4.11 have been completely smooth for us. Our update cycle is very fast: whenever a new Zabbix release comes out, I usually update shortly after. Because of that, long-term support is not a major requirement for us. We do not stay on old versions for a long time, and we do not rely heavily on vendor support.
The current environment is relatively small: around 224 hosts, around 4,300 items, and about 67 NVPS.
Now I want to build a new Zabbix server next to the current one. The idea is that the new server would initially be a controlled “half-production” or early-adoption system, while the current 7.4.11 server would remain available as a fallback and archive. Once Zabbix 8.0 stable is officially released, the new server would be upgraded to the stable release and then treated as the main production system.
I do not want to migrate historical data. I only plan to export and import the configuration: hosts, templates, host groups, macros, media types, actions, and possibly users or roles if needed. Historical data, trends, old events and problems are not important for this migration.
The planned stack for the new system would be Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS, Zabbix 8.0 pre-release, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, Nginx, and Zabbix Proxy. I also want to start using a proxy as part of this new design and move hosts step by step rather than switching everything at once.
My main question is: does this approach make sense, or would you recommend staying on Zabbix 7.4.11 until Zabbix 8.0 stable is officially released?
I fully understand that pre-release versions are not recommended for critical production use. However, in my specific case, I am not migrating history, the existing 7.4.11 system can remain as a fallback, the environment is small, and we already update Zabbix very frequently after each release. The new server would also be deployed alongside the existing one, not as an immediate replacement on day one.
I would especially appreciate feedback about Zabbix 8.0 pre-release stability, PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB with Zabbix 8.0, Ubuntu 26.04 compatibility, Zabbix Proxy compatibility, importing configuration from 7.4.11 to 8.0, and Agent or Agent2 compatibility between 7.4 and 8.0.
Has anyone tested a similar setup already? Would you consider this a reasonable early-adoption approach, or is it still better to stay on 7.4.11 for now and only move to 8.0 after the stable release?
Thanks in advance for any practical experience or advice.

We currently run Zabbix at our main site but would like to run Zabbix proxy at a remote site.

Zabbix website has info on installing it but I have a few general questions.

How do you point the proxy server to the Zabbix server? Or do you just add the proxy on the Zabbix server and it pulls the info from it?

Is there any web interface or configuration on the proxy itself?

or do you install a zabbix client at the endpoint, point it to the ip of the proxy, add the host to the main Zabbix server and select the proxy when configuring the host?

Hi everyone,

I'm integrating Aruba EdgeConnect (Silver Peak) into our monitoring platform and wanted to understand the recommended approach.

What are the recommended APIs for:

- Device discovery

- Interface discovery

- Packet loss, latency, and jitter (PLJ) monitoring

- Interface/bandwidth utilization

Should these be collected directly from the Orchestrator APIs, or is there a better or more scalable approach?

If anyone has experience with these APIs or can point me to the relevant endpoints or documentation, I'd really appreciate your guidance.

Thanks in advance!

Hi

How would you manage 4000 Hosts in Host Groups?

My idea was to Group them by Location and tag them by function.

Those hosts are more or less placeholders for a zabbix sender script that pushes some metrics into the item keys of those hosts.

But it clutters the whole host groups page.

Any way to fold it or hide if its too many?

On my Zabbix server from the terminal I can successfully do the following.
curl --location "https://{URL}i/v1/units/unit?hostname={host}" --header 'Authorization: API-Key {API-Key}'

Configuring HTTP agent

In the URL field I enter:
https://{URL}i/v1/units/unit?hostname={host}"

In the Headers section I configure:
Name:
Authorization:
Value:
API-Key {API-Key}

From Zabbix I get error 403 instead of the JSON response expected.

Response code "403" did not match any of the required status codes "200" <html> <head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head> <body> <center><h1>403 Forbidden</h1></center> </body> </html>

Any ideas?
Is there a document somewhere that can help translating curl output to http-agent?

Helll everyone,

I have 10s of thousands of hosts on Zabbix, I have some Grafana dashboards created to visualize some metrics concerning my hosts. My dashboards take a really long time to display information, considering it has to go through 100s of thousands of items via the Zabbix API (connected as a data source in Grafana) to get the info I need.

What are some ways have you employed to get data to be quickly visualized on your Grafana dashboard, considering the amount of hosts, and items per host that I have?

I was thinking of adding some cache layer between the Zabbix API, and Grafana, but I’m not sure that may be a viable solution as well.

Your responses would be much appreciated!

I have searched and searched. I am trying to show circuit utilization % on a map. Hoping for some help. Any is appreciated. I don't know what I am getting wrong in the expression. Either it doesn't work or it just shows the current speed and doesn't do the division or multiplication.

(300Mbps/10Gbps) * 100 = 3% is what I am trying to show

The ole reliable Google AI tells me to do {?100 * last(/HostName/net.if.out[ifHCOutOctets.InterfaceNumber]) / last(/HostName/net.if.speed[ifHighSpeed.InterfaceNumber])}% but that doesn't work. (Yes I have replaced variables with my hostname and SNMP index for the interface).

Thanks.

Hello,

We have a this template that polls a certain device which can be on a fast LAN or also 4G, it's set to poll every 2mins, but we want to change this to poll the 4G devices every 10mins due to the data plan they are on.

Is this a case of cloning the template and changing the poll time or can we just maintain 1 template and do something else?

Thanks