Zabbix 7.4 is Here! A Deep Dive into the Game-Changing New Features

Good morning, everyone! It’s Dimitri Bellini, and welcome back to Quadrata, my channel dedicated to the world of open-source IT. It’s an exciting week because our good friend, Zabbix, has just rolled out a major new version: Zabbix 7.4! After months of hard work from the Zabbix team, this release is packed with features that will change the way we monitor our infrastructure. So, let’s dive in together and explore what’s new.

The “Escapological” Feature: Nested Low-Level Discovery

Let’s start with what I consider the most mind-bending, “centrifugal” new feature: nested low-level discovery (LLD). Until now, LLD was fantastic for discovering objects like file systems or network interfaces on a host. But we couldn’t go deeper. If you discovered a database, you couldn’t then run another discovery *within* that database to find all its tablespaces dynamically.

With Zabbix 7.4, that limitation is gone! I’ve set up a demo to show you this in action. I created a discovery rule that finds all the databases on a host. From the output of that first discovery, a new “discovery prototype” of type “Nested” can now be created. This second-level discovery can then parse the data from the first one to find all the tablespaces specific to each discovered database.

The result? Zabbix first discovers DB1 and DB2, and then it automatically runs another discovery for each of them, creating items for every single tablespace (like TS1 for DB1, TS2 for DB1, etc.). This allows for an incredible level of granularity and automation, especially in complex environments like database clusters or containerized applications. This is a true game-changer.

And it doesn’t stop there. We can now also have host prototypes within host prototypes. Previously, if you discovered a VMware host and it created new hosts for each virtual machine, those new VM hosts couldn’t run their own discovery to create *more* hosts. Now they can, opening the door for multi-layered infrastructure discovery.

A Smarter Way to Onboard: The New Host Wizard

How many times have new users felt a bit lost when adding their first host to Zabbix? What hostname do I use? How do I configure the agent? The new Host Wizard solves this beautifully.

Found under Data Collection -> Host Wizard, this feature provides a step-by-step guide to get your monitoring up and running. Here’s a quick walkthrough:

1. Select a Template: You start by searching for the type of monitoring you need (e.g., “Linux”). The wizard will show you compatible templates. Note that not all templates are updated for the wizard yet, but the main ones for Linux, Windows, AWS, Azure, databases, and more are already there.
2. Define the Host: You provide a hostname and assign it to a host group, just like before, but in a much more guided way.
3. Configure the Agent: This is where the magic happens. For an active agent, for example, you input your Zabbix server/proxy IP and configure security (like a pre-shared key). The wizard then generates a complete installation script for you to copy and paste directly into your Linux or Windows shell! This script handles everything—installing the agent, configuring the server address, and setting up the keys. It’s incredibly convenient.
4. Fine-Tune and Deploy: The final step shows you the configurable macros for the template in a clean, human-readable format, making it easy to adjust thresholds before you create the host.

A quick heads-up: I did notice a small bug where the wizard’s script currently installs Zabbix Agent 7.2 instead of 7.4. I’ve already opened a ticket, and I’m sure the Zabbix team will have it fixed in a patch release like 7.4.1 very soon.

Dashboard and Visualization Upgrades

Real-Time Editing and a Fresh Look

Dashboards have received a major usability boost. You no longer have to click “Edit,” make a change to a widget, save it, and then see the result. Now, all changes are applied in real-time as you configure the widget. If you thicken a line in a graph, you see it thicken instantly. This makes dashboard creation so much faster and more intuitive.

Furthermore, Zabbix has introduced color palettes for graphs. Gone are the days of having multiple metrics on a graph with nearly identical shades of the same color. You can now choose a palette that assigns distinct, pleasant, and easily recognizable colors to each item, making your graphs far more readable.

The New Item Card Widget

There’s a new widget in town called the Item Card. When used with something like the Host Navigator widget, you can select a host, then select a specific item (like CPU Utilization), and the Item Card will populate with detailed information about that item: its configuration, recent values, a mini-graph, and any associated triggers. It’s a fantastic way to get a quick, focused overview of a specific metric.

Powerful Enhancements for Maps and Monitoring

Maps Get a Major Overhaul

Maps are now more powerful and visually appealing than ever. Here are the key improvements:

• Element Ordering: Finally, we can control the Z-index of map elements! You can bring elements to the front or send them to the back. This means you can create a background image of a server rack and place your server icons perfectly on top of it, which was impossible to do reliably before.
• Auto-Hiding Labels: To clean up busy maps, labels can now be set to appear only when you hover your mouse over an element.
• Dynamic Link Indicators: The lines connecting elements on a map are no longer just tied to trigger status. You can now have their color or style change based on an item’s value, allowing you to visualize things like link bandwidth utilization directly on your map.

More Control with New Functions and Security

Zabbix 7.4 also brings more power under the hood:

• OAuth 2.0 Support: You can now easily configure email notifications using Gmail and Office 365, as Zabbix provides a wizard to handle the OAuth 2.0 authentication.
• Frontend-to-Server Encryption: For security-conscious environments, you can now enable encryption for the communication between the Zabbix web frontend and the Zabbix server.
• New Time-Based Functions: Functions like first.clock and last.clock have been added, giving us more power to correlate events based on their timestamps, especially when working with logs.

Small Changes, Big Impact: Quality of Life Improvements

Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference in our day-to-day work. Zabbix 7.4 is full of them:

• Inline Form Validation: When creating an item or host, Zabbix now instantly highlights any required fields you’ve missed, preventing errors before you even try to save.
• Copy Button for Test Output: When you test a preprocessing step and get a large JSON output, there’s now a simple “Copy” button. No more struggling to select all the text in the small window!
• New Templates: The library of official templates continues to grow, with notable additions for enterprise hardware like Pure Storage.

Final Thoughts

Zabbix 7.4 is a massive step forward. From the revolutionary nested discovery to the user-friendly Host Wizard and the countless usability improvements, this release offers something for everyone. It makes Zabbix both more powerful for seasoned experts and more accessible for newcomers.

What do you think of this new release? Is there a feature you’re particularly excited about, or something you’d like me to cover in more detail? The nested discovery part can be complex, so I’m happy to discuss it further. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

And with that, that’s all for today. See you next week!

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