Software update: Zabbix 2.2.0

Version 2.2.0 of Zabbix has been released, a major release. With this program, the status of network services, servers and other network equipment can be monitored. By itself, the program can only display simple information, but by installing a so-called agent on the server, more detailed information can also be obtained. More information about Zabbix can be found on this page be found and here are some screenshots. The changelog for this release looks like this:

What’s New in 2.2.0

• Performance improvements
  Overall system performance was significantly improved thanks to introduction of value cache for faster trigger processing. Also data sender process and housekeeper were optimized to run faster. Increased performance of operations related to historical and configuration caches. Added support of parallel processing of time-based functions by Zabbix server.
  Also number of update operations was greatly decreased when processing new data. It leads to massive performance improvement for data collection and processing as well as better responsiveness of the interface.
• Monitoring of vCenter and vSphere
  Added support of monitoring of VMWare virtualization platforms including auto-discovery of VMs, monitoring of performance and availability of both VMs and hypervisors as well as nice handling of migration of virtual machines.
• Loadable modules
  Added support of loadable modules for extending Zabbix agent checks, also server and proxy agentless checks.
• Removed support of unknown events
  Unknown events are no longer generated and supported. New triggers will now be created in OK state.
• Applications are allowed to be inherited from different templates
  Application inheritance logic was changed to allow linking multiple templates with the same applications.
• Internal events
  Internal events were introduced to allow actions and notifications in case of unknown triggers or not supported items.
• Automatic database upgrade
  Zabbix will automatically update database structure when upgrading to newer major version of Zabbix.
• Fine grained control of housekeeper
  Housekeeper supports fine grained control on what history tables should be processes and how.
• Processing of macros
  Implemented support of user macros in global scripts, script confirmation text, trigger comments and allowed hosts for trapper items. Complex macros like {host:key.last/min/avg/max()} supported in graph titles. Implemented new notification macros: {ITEM.STATE}, {LLDRULE.ID}, {LLDRULE.NAME}, {LLDRULE.DESCRIPTION}, {LLDRULE.KEY}, {LLDRULE.STATE} and {TRIGGER.STATE}.
  Added support of LLD macros in trigger prototype expressions, descriptions as well as in item prototypes. Added support of new notification macros: {TRIGGER.NAME.ORIG}, {ITEM.NAME.ORIG}, {ITEM.KEY.ORIG}. Updated macros {ACTION.*} and {EVENT.RECOVERY.*}; {EVENT.*} to return information of the event which triggered an action.
• User permissions
  Permission logic was changed so that read permission does not override write permission anymore.
• Increased maximum number of objects
  Zabbix may contain up-to 2^64-1 of different types of objects (items, triggers, events, etc) in non-DM setup.
• Host prototypes
  Added support of host prototypes for low level discovery.
• Zabbix API related improvements
  Zabbix API was fully documented with changelog and detailed description for all objects and methods.
  Methods proxy.delete, user.delete and host.delete were changed to accept both objects and IDs. Implemented property array support for all get methods. Implemented map.get selectUrls parameter and itemprototype.get selectDiscoveryRule parameter. Dropped support of output shorten for the API get methods. Dropped the event value_changed property.
• WEB monitoring related improvements
  Added support for content retrieval based on regular expressions, configurable number of retries per web scenario, web monitoring using HTTP proxy and support of templated web scenarios.
• Better monitoring of proxies
  Added support of internal items for monitoring health of proxies.
• Monitoring using WMI
  Windows agent was enhanced to support native WMI requests.
• SNMP related improvements
  Added context name support, SHA authentication protocol and AES privacy protocol for SNMPv3 checks. Also added support of multiple dynamic SNMP indexes.
• IPMI related improvements
  Added support of IPMI discrete sensors.
• Front end related improvements
  Regular expressions and maintenance periods form form were redesigned. Implemented multiselect in dashboard configuration, Action -> Conditions and Operations, Script, Item filter and host and host group related pages. Redesigned Host -> Templates form and added multiselect. Improved multiselect, added possibility to ignore elements. Implemented discovery rule check editing. Added possibility to add new elements in multiselect, added multiselect in hosts mass update and in items mass update form, and fixed regressions in application.massadd and in application filter. Other usability improvements.
  Implemented minimum trigger severity filter in maps.
  Added support of anti-aliasing for graphs and map connectors.
  Added support of value mapping for character data.
  Added filtering by application in Monitoring -> Overview and Data/Triggers overview screen elements.
• Agent-related improvements
  Added support of proc.num, net.if.in, net.if.out, net.if.total for HP-UX, system.swap.size for AIX, net.if.discovery for FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD; added printing Aliases and PerfCounters when agent is run with -p option. Added whitespace trimming for server lists in agent conf file and allowed hosts for trapper items. Added used swap size support for Windows and OSF. Added support of Windows event log source regex filter.
• Triggers
  Increased length to 2048 characters of expression field for triggers.
• Templates
  WEB scenarios can be templated.
• Discovery and auto registration
  Added support for optional host metadata to active agent for auto-registration.
• Support of PHP 5.5
  Added support of PHP 5.5 that introduced new API for work with MySQL.
• Access to historical data
  Allowed access to historical data for disabled hosts.
• Better displaying of user names in acknowledgments
  Implemented user name and surname displaying in acknowledgments.
• Better network auto-discovery
  Changed network discovery to take in account proxies when identifying discovered hosts.
• Hierachical menu for execution of scripts
  Added support of tree-like structure in the host menu for user scripts.
• Displaying of host and item information under Monitoring
  Host and item details are available in Monitoring->Inventory and Monitoring->Latest data sections of Zabbix WEB interface.
• Windows Eventing 6.0
  Added support of Windows Eventing for event log collection from all Windows platforms.
• Zabbix dynamic link library for Windows
  Added Zabbix sender dynamic link library (DLL) for trouble-free integration of Zabbix monitoring with your own applications under Windows platforms.
• Zabbix sender improvements
  Zabbix sender exit status now better reflects the operation result – success:0, partial success:2, failure:1.
• Visibility of current Zabbix process activity
  Added dynamic display of process current activity and statistics in “ps” and “top”.
• Other improvements
  Added zfs to the default list of filesystems discovered by LLD based templates. Added logging of used configuration file name for all Zabbix daemons. Added support of AllowRoot by server and proxy daemons.