Unlock Powerful Visualizations: Exploring Zabbix 7.0 Dashboards

Good morning everyone! Dimitri Bellini here, back with another episode on Quadrata, my channel dedicated to the world of open source and IT. Today, we’re diving back into our favorite monitoring tool, Zabbix, but focusing on an area we haven’t explored much recently: **data visualization and dashboarding**, especially with the exciting improvements in Zabbix 7.0.

For a long time, many of us (myself included!) might have leaned towards Grafana for sophisticated dashboards, and rightly so – it set a high standard. However, Zabbix has been working hard, taking inspiration from the best, and Zabbix 7.0 introduces some fantastic new widgets and capabilities that significantly boost its native dashboarding power, pushing towards better observability of our collected metrics.

Why Zabbix Dashboards Now Deserve Your Attention

Zabbix 7.0 marks a significant step forward in visualization. The web interface’s dashboard section has received substantial upgrades, introducing new widgets that make creating informative and visually appealing dashboards easier than ever. Forget needing a separate tool for basic visualization; Zabbix now offers compelling options right out of the box.

Some of the key additions in 7.0 include:

• Gauge Widgets: For clear, immediate visualization of single metrics against thresholds.
• Pie Chart / Donut Widgets: Classic ways to represent proportions.
• On-Icon Widget: Excellent for compactly displaying the status of many items (like host availability).
• Host Navigator & Item Navigator: Powerful tools for creating dynamic, interactive dashboards where you can drill down into specific hosts and their metrics.
• Item Value Widget: Displays a single metric’s value with trend indication.

Building a Dynamic Dashboard in Zabbix 7.0: A Walkthrough

In the video, I demonstrated how to leverage some of these new features. Let’s recap the steps to build a more dynamic and insightful dashboard:

Step 1: Creating Your Dashboard

It all starts in the Zabbix interface under Dashboards -> All dashboards. Click “Create dashboard”, give it a meaningful name (I used “test per video”), and you’ll be presented with an empty canvas, ready for your first widget.

Step 2: Adding the Powerful Graph Widget

The standard graph widget, while not brand new, has become incredibly flexible.

• Host/Item Selection: You can use wildcards (*) for both hosts (e.g., Linux server*) and items (e.g., Bits received*) to aggregate data from multiple sources onto a single graph.
• Aggregation: Easily aggregate data over time intervals (e.g., show the sum or average traffic every 3 minutes).
• Stacking: Use the “Stacked” option combined with aggregation to visualize total resource usage (like total bandwidth across multiple servers).
• Multiple Datasets: Add multiple datasets (like ‘Bits received’ and ‘Bits sent’) to the same graph for comprehensive views.
• Customization: Control line thickness, fill transparency, handling of missing data, axis limits (e.g., setting a max bandwidth), legend display, and even overlay trigger information or working hours.

This allows for creating dense, informative graphs showing trends across groups of systems or interfaces.

Step 3: Introducing Interactivity with Navigators

This is where Zabbix 7.0 dashboards get really dynamic!

Host Navigator Setup

Add the “Host Navigator” widget. Configure it to target a specific host group (e.g., Linux Servers). You can further filter by host status (enabled/disabled), maintenance status, or tags. This widget provides a clickable list of hosts.

Item Navigator Setup

Next, add the “Item Navigator” widget. The key here is to link it to the Host Navigator:

• In the “Host” selection, choose “From widget” and select your Host Navigator widget.
• Specify the host group again.
• Use “Item tags” to filter the list of items shown (e.g., show only items with the tag component having the value network).
• Use “Group by” (e.g., group by the component tag) to organize the items logically within the navigator. (Note: In the video, I noticed a slight confusion where the UI might label tag value filtering as tag name, something to keep an eye on).

Now, clicking a host in the Host Navigator filters the items shown in the Item Navigator – the first step towards interactive drill-down!

Step 4: Visualizing Single Metrics (Gauge & Item Value)

With the navigators set up, we can add widgets that react to our selections:

Gauge Widget

Add a “Gauge” widget. Configure its “Item” setting to inherit “From widget” -> “Item Navigator”. Now, when you select an item in the Item Navigator (after selecting a host), this gauge will automatically display that metric’s latest value. Customize it with:

• Min/Max values and units (e.g., %, BPS).
• Thresholds (defining ranges for Green, Yellow, Red) for instant visual feedback.
• Appearance options (angles, decimals).

Item Value Widget

Similarly, add an “Item Value” widget, also inheriting its item from the “Item Navigator”. This provides a simple text display of the value, often with a trend indicator (up/down arrow). You can customize:

• Font size and units.
• Whether to show the timestamp.
• Thresholds that can change the background color of the widget for high visibility.

Step 5: Monitoring Multiple Hosts with On-Icon

The “On-Icon” widget is fantastic for a compact overview of many similar items across multiple hosts.

• Configure it to target a host group (e.g., Linux Servers).
• Select a specific item pattern relevant to status (e.g., agent.ping).
• Set thresholds (e.g., Red if value is 0, Green if value is 1) to color-code each host’s icon based on the item value.

This gives you an immediate “at-a-glance” view of the health or status of all hosts in the group regarding that specific metric. The icons automatically resize to fit the widget space.

Putting It All Together

By combining these widgets – graphs for trends, navigators for interactivity, and gauges/item values/on-icons for specific states – you can build truly powerful and informative dashboards directly within Zabbix 7.0. The ability to dynamically filter and drill down without leaving the dashboard is a massive improvement.

Join the Conversation!

So, that’s a first look at the enhanced dashboarding capabilities in Zabbix 7.0. There’s definitely a lot to explore, and these new tools significantly improve how we can visualize our monitoring data.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one!

– Dimitri Bellini