Requirements¶
Zabbix has a set of requirements that need to be met on the hardware level and software level. These requirements can change over time and also depends on the size of your setup and the software you choose. So before you start buying metal or installing a random database version have a look at the Zabbix documentation and check the latest requirements for the version you want to install. The latest requirements can be found here. Don't forget to select your correct Zabbix version from the list.
If you don't plan to run anything big just a small setup or a test setup Zabbix will run happy on a system with 2cpu and 8G ram. But all depends on how big your setup will be and how many items you will monitor, triggers you will create and for how long you want to keep that data. My advice in the days of Virtualization is you can start small and add more later.
For the setup you can choose to install all components on 1 server or every component on a different server. For the ease of use just make a few notes for yourself:.
| server | ip |
|---|---|
| zabbix server | |
| database server | |
| web server |
Tip
While zabbix uses dashes "-" in it's names when we need to install packages like zabbix-get or zabbix-sender it's binaries use "_". like zabbix_sender or zabbix_server. This of course can vary depending if you use the packages from the original Zabbix repositories or not. Just be aaware that it's sometimes rather confusing and that if you installed somepackage with a dash that maybe the binary is with an underscore.
Basic OS configuration¶
firewall¶
It's important for our Zabbix server to have an OS that is well prepared before we start to install our monitoring tool. First we need to make sure our firewall is installed.
# dnf install firewalld --now
Our firewall is installed now, and we are ready to configure the needed ports. For our Zabbix server, we need to allow access to port 10051/tcp this is the port where our Zabbix trapper listens on for incoming data. So we need to open this port in our firewall to allow access to our Zabbix trapper.
# firewall-cmd --add-service=Zabbix-server --permanent
or if the service is not known
# firewall-cmd --add-port=10051/tcp --permanent
firewalld
"Firewalld is the replacement of iptables in Redhat and allows us to make changes available immediately without the need to restart a service. It's possible that your distribution is not using Firewalld in this case you have to look to the documentation of your OS."
timeserver¶
Another thing we need to configure is the setup of timeserver and sync our Zabbix server to the timeserver by making use of an ntp client. This needs to be done for the Zabbix server but also for the devices we will monitor as time is very important for Zabbix. Imagine one of our hosts having a time zone that is wrong we could end up looking for a problem in Zabbix that happened 6h ago while it had happened maybe only 2h ago.
# dnf install chronyd --now
Chrony should be installed now and enabled and running. This can be verified with the command:
# systemctl status chronyd
dnf
"dnf is a packagemanager from RedHat you need to replace dnf with your correct packagemanager like zyper, apt, yum, ... chrony is a replacement for ntpd and does a better job being faster and more accurate. If your OS does not support chrony then maybe ntpd is still available."
Once Chrony is installed we also need to setup our correct time zone. We can have a look first with 'timedatectl' to see how our time is configured
# timedatectl
Local time: Thu 2023-11-16 15:09:14 UTC
Universal time: Thu 2023-11-16 15:09:14 UTC
RTC time: Thu 2023-11-16 15:09:15
Time zone: UTC (UTC, +0000)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
Make sure that the service cronyd is active, see above on how to do if you missed it. We can choose the correct time zone from a list that we can lookup with the following command:
# timedatectl list-time zones
This will give us a list with all available time zones. Choose the one closest to you.
Africa/Abidjan
Africa/Accra
...
Pacific/Tongatapu
Pacific/Wake
Pacific/Wallis
UTC
We can now configure our correct time zone with the following command:
timedatectl set-time zone Europe/Brussels
When we look again we should see our time zone properly configured.
# timedatectl
Local time: Thu 2023-11-16 16:13:35 CET
Universal time: Thu 2023-11-16 15:13:35 UTC
RTC time: Thu 2023-11-16 15:13:36
Time zone: Europe/Brussels (CET, +0100)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
Note
"Some people like to install all servers in the UTC time zone so that all server logs are in the same time zone when having servers all over the world. Zabbix supports user based time zone settings so it's possible to keep the time zone in UTC on the server and then add the correct time zone in the user interface if you like."
We can test if Chrony is syncronizing with the correct timeservers as well by running the command chronyc
# chronyc
chrony version 4.2
Copyright (C) 1997-2003, 2007, 2009-2021 Richard P. Curnow and others
chrony comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and
you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. See the
GNU General Public License version 2 for details.
chronyc>
Then we type sources
chronyc> sources
MS Name/IP address Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample
===============================================================================
^- 51-15-20-83.rev.poneytel> 2 9 377 354 +429us[ +429us] +/- 342ms
^- 5.255.99.180 2 10 377 620 +7424us[+7424us] +/- 37ms
^- hachi.paina.net 2 10 377 412 +445us[ +445us] +/- 39ms
^* leontp1.office.panq.nl 1 10 377 904 +6806ns[ +171us] +/- 2336us
Here we can see that we are using a bunch of ntp servers that are not in our own country so we better swicht to some timeservers in our local country or if we have a timeserver in our company we could use this one. We can find some local timeservers here : https://www.ntppool.org/
To change this we have to edit our config file "/etc/chrony.conf" and replace the existing ntp server with our local one
# Use public servers from the pool.ntp.org project.
# Please consider joining the pool (http://www.pool.ntp.org/join.html).
pool 2.centos.pool.ntp.org iburst
And change it to a local server:
# Use public servers from the pool.ntp.org project.
# Please consider joining the pool (http://www.pool.ntp.org/join.html).
pool be.pool.ntp.org iburst
Don't forget to restart the ntpd client of course.
# systemctl restart chronyd
When we look again we will see that we are now using our local timeservers.
chronyc> sources
MS Name/IP address Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample
===============================================================================
^- ntp1.unix-solutions.be 2 6 17 43 -375us[ -676us] +/- 28ms
^* ntp.devrandom.be 2 6 17 43 -579us[ -880us] +/- 2877us
^+ time.cloudflare.com 3 6 17 43 +328us[ +27us] +/- 2620us
^+ time.cloudflare.com 3 6 17 43 +218us[ -83us] +/- 2815us