Zabbix 6.0 - new major release

While the whole world seems to run prometheus, zabbix is still on track and provides a whole set of new features on it's next major release: Zabbix 6.0.

This post will give a brief overview about the (in my opinion) most important features.

Baseline monitoring

This is one of the greatest features for a long time. You might call it machine learning, while technically it's rather baseline monitoring, so don't expect zabbix to turn into skynet.

Why is this so important?

Consider the case where you want to monitor things like disk latency, api response times or anything similar. The principle is the same most of the time: You've a mostly constant metric (like measured avg over time).

As zabbix thinks in templates, you want to build one template and apply it to as many systems as possible (to reduce management overhead). Until zabbix 6.0 you needed to use MACROS and adjust values on each host / child template to adjust the values for your use case.

With baseline monitoring you can (within boundaries obviously) use a statistical approach to detect anomalies on the timeline series and trigger alerts based on these.

Kubernetes monitoring

If you don't want to build your own templates or you just don't have enough time, zabbix provides you ready to use templates to monitor your kubernetes cluster.

Monitoring will use API calls and therefore be agentless. This is especially important in environments where you cannot run additional workloads beside the API components (like on cloud managed kubernetes control planes).

TLS/SSL certificate monitoring

A quite simple feature that enables you to monitor validity and lifetime of TLS certificates. I wish everyone would make use of this asap, as it's quite a shame how often certificates still expire nowadays before they are replaced.

One downside here: Monitoring supports TLS on connection establishment only. Monitoring StartTLS like required on SMTP or LDAP endpoints is missing unfortunately here. In such a case you'll still need to use openssl or provide your own extension to the agent.

These are only the most useful features, there's a lot more - check out the release notes at zabbix: What's new in Zabbix 6.0 LTS