Installing Zabbix 3.2 on Debian Jessie

Stelios Milidonis

• 3 min read
Installing Zabbix 3.2 on Debian Jessie

Zabbix is enterprise open source monitoring software for networks and applications, created by Alexei Vladishev. It is designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware.

Zabbix uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle or IBM DB2 to store data.[2] Its backend is written in C and the web frontend is written in PHP. Zabbix offers several monitoring options:

  • Simple checks can verify the availability and responsiveness of standard services such as SMTP or HTTP without installing any software on the monitored host.
  • A Zabbix agent can also be installed on UNIX and Windows hosts to monitor statistics such as CPU load, network utilization, disk space, etc.
  • As an alternative to installing an agent on hosts, Zabbix includes support for monitoring via SNMP, TCP and ICMP checks, as well as over IPMI, JMX, SSH, Telnet and using custom parameters. Zabbix supports a variety of near-real-time notification mechanisms, including XMPP.

The following guide will help you setup and configure Zabbix 3.2 on Debian Jessie

Add the repository

wget http://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/3.2/debian/pool/main/z/zabbix-release/zabbix-release_3.2-1+jessie_all.deb

dpkg -i zabbix-release_3.2-1+jessie_all.deb

apt-get update

Install Packages

apt-get install zabbix-server-mysql zabbix-frontend-php

Initialize database user with a password 12345(please change the password)

Then create the zabbix database and zabbixuser

shell> mysql -uroot -p<root_password>
mysql> create database zabbix character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;
mysql> grant all privileges on zabbix.* to zabbix@localhost identified by '<password>';
mysql> quit;

Then import initial schema and data. You will be prompted to enter your newly created password.

 zcat /usr/share/doc/zabbix-server-mysql/create.sql.gz | mysql -uzabbix -p zabbix

Database configuration for Zabbix server

Edit server host, name, user and password in zabbix_server.conf as follows, where DBPassword is the password you've set creating initial database::

nano /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf

DBHost=localhost
DBName=zabbix
DBUser=zabbix
DBPassword=<password>

Starting Zabbix server process

Now you may start Zabbix server process and make it start at system boot

service zabbix-server start
update-rc.d zabbix-server enable

PHP configuration for Zabbix frontend

Apache configuration file for Zabbix frontend is located in /etc/zabbix/apache.conf. Some PHP settings are already configured. But it's necessary to uncomment the “date.timezone” setting and set the right timezone for you.

php_value max_execution_time 300
php_value memory_limit 128M
php_value post_max_size 16M
php_value upload_max_filesize 2M
php_value max_input_time 300
php_value always_populate_raw_post_data -1
# php_value date.timezone Europe/Riga

After that you need to restart Apache web server:

service apache2 restart

Installing using Docker Containers

Run zabbix mysql container using volumes option so that the database is saved on the host

 docker run -d -v /var/lib/mysql:/var/lib/mysql   --name zabbix-db     --env="MARIADB_USER=zabbix"     --env="MARIADB_PASS=zabbix"     -p 3306:3306 monitoringartist/zabbix-db-mariadb

Then run the zabbix container which connect to the database container

 docker run     -d     --name zabbix     -p 80:80     -p 10051:10051     -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro     --link zabbix-db:zabbix.db     --env="ZS_DBHost=zabbix.db"     --env="ZS_DBUser=zabbix"     --env="ZS_DBPassword=zabbix"     --env="XXL_zapix=true"     --env="XXL_grapher=true"     monitoringartist/zabbix-xxl:latest

You can then simply do database backups and restores using the following commands from host
Backup

mysqldump -uzabbix -h172.17.0.1 -pzabbix zabbix  > /srv/zabbix_db_dump.sql

Restore

mysql -uzabbix -h172.17.0.1 -pzabbix zabbix  < /srv/zabbix_db_dump.sql