7 октября 2019
With significant improvements in performance and usability, Zabbix continues to bring monitoring flexibility to a whole new level. Here is a brief list of the most important features included in Zabbix 4.0. This release will be supported for 5 years.
Improved visualization
A newly improved graph widget that uses a new data collection approach. The widget allows us to create various charts, work with many figures, select sets of indicators or separate individual indicators for charts, configure chart line styles, layout of legends, and it supports displaying information about detected problems directly on the charts. Additional information is displayed on the charts right next to your cursor.
Easy time range selection
The time range selection has been reworked. It now allows using the syntax of words, such as "now" or "now-1d/d," to access data quickly. The selected time range can be scaled, moved back, or forward, and you can select frequently used time ranges with a single click.
Focus on the main thing
Search mode is optimized for video and is now supported on all pages where the full screen is available. In this mode, you can use Dashboard, Problems, Latest data, and all other monitoring sections. The unnecessary distracting information was removed from the toolbar widgets.
More details with the same screen size
The new compact view is the best for NOC (Network Operation Center) engineers. This design increases efficiency and gives a clear understanding of the problems. Use the compact view to see the maximum number of problems over time. Troubleshooting has been significantly improved and now supports various filters and options.
Faster and more reliable distributed monitoring
Zabbix 4.0 uses compression proxy, which is enabled by default. This solution provides a compression level that significantly reduces the size of the transmitted data. As a result, the volume of network traffic decreases, which leads to a noticeable improvement in performance. Passive proxies are now rejected without a list of IP addresses or DNS names and require the Server parameter. All supported Zabbix proxy parameters are described in the documentation.
Improved workflow for faster problem solving
Much more complex workflows can be used for more flexible and efficient solving of complex tasks. Now you can manually close an individual problem and/or change the severity of the problem with or without confirming, commenting, or sending a message! These operations are controlled by user permissions and can be changed at any time. You have a complete list of all operations and actions related to this problem.
Tag-based permissions
The new tag-based permissions allow extremely flexible access to information about specific problems with user groups if they match a combination of pre-defined tags and tag values. Therefore, access to issues can be narrowed to any information stored in tags: environment, data center, location, country, service name, department, and so on.
Tag-based service
In addition to the already supported host service levels or host groups, Zabbix can now narrow them to a combination of tags and tag values.
Collecting data over HTTP/HTTPS protocols
The new HTTP agent element type opens up a wide range of possibilities for collecting performance and availability data from various sources using the HTTP and HTTPS protocols. Use it together with preprocessing and dependent elements to get a super-powerful combination for efficiently collecting data from Rest API, XML, SOAP, JSON RPC, Prometheus, and even text data sources.
A single point of entry
New HTTP authentication settings for installing single sign-on to your web server.
We care about accessibility
Accessibility is essential, and the Zabbix interface now supports assistive technologies, making it more convenient for visually impaired people. To solve this issue, two specially designed high-contrast themes were added to the Zabbix user interface.
Some of the features include user-level readable content and top-level navigation, as well as graph values as text in a table so that it can be used for screen reading.
Except for maps, Zabbix provides keyboard access to all interactive elements. Besides, all pop-up windows can be opened, processed, and closed using only the keyboard.
Many other improvements
If you change the host metadata, you can restart the automatic registration of the active agent. It allows you to adapt monitoring depending on the nature of changes on the host and allows you to change the role of the host itself.
Data storage in Elasticsearch is supported. Independent choice of storage location when integrating with third-party solutions. Detailed settings are described in the documentation. Integration with other systems is supported through real-time data export in the form of text data.
