Zabbix Server not running after upgrading to 7.4.0
Upgrading a self-hosted Zabbix instance in Kubernetes sounds like a straightforward task, right? That’s what I thought - until I upgraded our Zabbix deployment to version 7.4.0 and was greeted by an all-too-familiar frontend error:
“Zabbix server is not running”
This post walks through the upgrade process, the problem I encountered, and the fix involving two critical environment variables: ZBX_NODEADDRESS
and ZBX_NODEADDRESSPORT
.
Background: Zabbix on Kubernetes
We’ve been running Zabbix in Kubernetes for monitoring various parts of our infrastructure. The stack includes:
- Zabbix Server
- Zabbix Frontend
- Zabbix Agent
- PostgreSQL
All components are deployed using a custom Helm chart.
The Upgrade to Zabbix 7.4.0
I followed the usual helm upgrade path and waited till the pods started up the new images. Everything looked fine at the first sight - No errors. No crashes. No unexpected restarts. Even the zabbix-server container logs looked promising.
After opening the frontend this message jumped in my face:
“Zabbix server is not running”
The Investigation
I started by validating the following:
- Pod health: All containers were running.
- Logs: No warnings or errors on the application stack.
- Network: Verified connectivity between frontend and server services.
- Database: Schema upgraded properly; no errors in
zabbix_server.log
.
I even tried port-forwarding and connecting to the server from within the frontend pod using telnet
and nc
. All connections succeeded. It looked like everything was fine.
The missing Puzzle Pieces
Digging through the release changelog and searching for 7.4.0 related issues, I ended up on this Jira Ticket, where I also found the working solution: https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBX-26625
For docker installation add that parameters to zabbix/zabbix-server-mysql section (follow name of your container):
-e ZBX_NODEADDRESS=zabbix-server-mysql
-e ZBX_NODEADDRESSPORT=10051
Solution
Update the Zabbix server deployment to include the mentioned environment variables:
- name: ZBX_NODEADDRESS
value: "zabbix-server-svc1"
- name: ZBX_NODEADDRESSPORT
value: "10051"
Note that Ive set the DNS name of the Zabbix server kubernetes service as value for ZBX_NODEADDRESS
.
After applying the changes, the frontend loaded correctly and showed, that the server is running again.
Final Thoughts
This was a great reminder that not all upgrades are plug-and-play, especially with evolving applications like Zabbix.
Hope this helped you save time and avoid the same rabbit hole I went down.