As some may know, I’m maintaining the Zabbix Agent addon package for IPFire, and I would like to perform a little community survey about the future of this package:
Currently, like most main Linux distro’s, we ship zabbix_agentd v6.0 (LTS) which works with Zabbix Server versions 6.0, 6.2, 6.4 and 7.0 and will keep working with 7.2 and 7.4 and so on. (Even Agent v1.4 is still compatible with Server 7.0).
The other way around however is more of an issue: Zabbix Agent 7.0 will not work with a Zabbix Server 6.0 or even 6.4.
Zabbix itself has it’s own repositories for most of the main distro’s providing them with more recent (or older) versions, so users have a choice there that they don’t have here on IPFire. (Although you could compile your own version for IPFire, if you wanted)
So currently we are in line with most main Linux distro’s out there and we will stay with an LTS version.
However the recent Zabbix Agent 7.0 LTS has a few notable new features:
Heartbeat for Active agents
Shown as a green availability icon in the Zabbix UI. Current zabbix_agentd 6.0 causes this icon to turn gray with status ‘unknown’ on Zabbix Server 7.0 for an IPFire host.
Item-level timeouts
Makes it possible to set higher timeout values for certain checks that could be too slow on embedded or slower systems, enhancing monitoring on such systems… (ex: Pakfire related checks tend to timeout sometimes on slower systems)
In my opinion, it would be nice to have zabbix_agentd 7.0 in IPFire; however with the current capabilities of Pakfire and package management on IPFire, there can only be one version. And if that is version 7.0, then users with a Zabbix Server 6.0, 6.2 or 6.4 will no longer be able to monitor IPFire.
Changing this, to allow multiple available versions for installation on IPFire, would require some internal changes to Pakfire and such (details still need to be investigated).
Since we don’t know how many IPFire users are actually using Zabbix and which versions, I wanted to check if you are actually waiting for this?
Should IPFire provide a package for Zabbix Agent 7.0 already ?
If so, should IPFire still provide a package for Zabbix Agent 6.0 at the same time ?
If not, how long should we stay on 6.0 before going to 7.0 ?
Possible options are:
until feb 2025 when Zabbix general support for v6.0 ends (upstream general fixes development stops for the 6.0 branch)
until feb 2027 when Zabbix extended support for v6.0 ends (upstream critical, and security fixes development for the 6.0 branch stops)
Couldn’t you offer 7.0 in pakfire but have the 6.0 packages on your GitHub page? From what Ive seen of development they lean towards the newer packages that are stable or they patch them to be what ipfire needs. I have just started looking at zabbix to which i went with the latest and greatest 7.2 and I am in the process of figuring out if it will be useful to the company i work for.
Not really, as there is no easy way of installing an externally provided package on IPFire. Pakfire is currently solely designed to install packages from IPFire repositories and packages are also dependent on the core update they where compiled on.
True, but most, if not all of those packages won’t break compatibility with external clients/servers if applicable.
Zabbix agent however, if we would ship v7.0 with IPFire, breaks compatibility with Zabbix 6.0 which is still fully supported by Zabbix and still gets bug- and security fixes.
So many companies (including the one I work for), will still be using 6.0 for a while and I don’t want to break things for them (in case they use IPFire). After all, upgrading to Zabbix Agent 7.0 would only bring a few (handy) enhancements (see my first post) but main functionality would remain the same.
Hence my call out here, to check if there actually are IPFire users still using Zabbix 6.0…
The current reactions however do not indicate that there are still Zabbix 6.x users among the IPFire users here so I may indeed switch to agent 7.0 in upcoming months.
Great, welcome to the club! Zabbix has its quirks, but is extremely flexible and versatile with a lively community so you will have a lot of fun experimenting with it. Also checkout my post here: Installing complementary monitoring with or on the IPFire server - #10 by robinr1 for a few extra starting tips.
I do recommend however, in a company setting, to stay on .0 LTS versions as the .2 and .4 releases stop getting updates immediately whenever a new version is released. So when you don’t have the time or resources to upgrade immediately, your instance may become vulnerable to security issues, or bugs may pop up that won’t get a fix anymore. A small single instance is upgraded easily, but when it grows over time and monitors thousands of hosts with hundreds of different templates using dozens of different monitoring methods having large history and trend datasets in the DB and possibly many Zabbix Proxies connecting to it and/or a HA setup. It will start taking some serious planning and time investment to upgrade to a next version smoothly. Staying on LTS keeps the pressure lower to upgrade immediately and avoids the scenario where on one day you are suddenly forced to upgrade on short term. And it also gives you the luxury of waiting at least a few minor releases until the biggest new bugs possibly introduced in a new major version, are fixed
