zabbix-docker/zabbix-appliance/rhel

What is Zabbix?

Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution.

Zabbix is software that monitors numerous parameters of a network and the health and integrity of servers. Zabbix uses a flexible notification mechanism that allows users to configure e-mail based alerts for virtually any event. This allows a fast reaction to server problems. Zabbix offers excellent reporting and data visualisation features based on the stored data. This makes Zabbix ideal for capacity planning.

For more information and related downloads for Zabbix components, please visit Red Hat Container Catalog and https://zabbix.com

What is Zabbix appliance?

Zabbix appliance contains MySQL database server, Zabbix server, Zabbix Java Gateway and Zabbix frontend based on Nginx web-server.

Zabbix appliance images

These are the only official Zabbix appliance Docker images. They are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 images. The available versions of Zabbix appliance are:

Zabbix appliance 5.0
Zabbix appliance 5.2

Images are updated when new releases are published. The image with latest tag is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

The image uses MySQL database. The image is very useful for testing purposes.

How to use this image

Start zabbix-appliance

Start a Zabbix server container as follows:

docker run --name some-zabbix-appliance -p 80:8080 -p 10051:10051 -d registry.connect.redhat.com/zabbix/zabbix-appliance:tag

Where some-zabbix-appliance is the name you want to assign to your container. See the list above for relevant tags, or look at the full list of tags.

Container shell access and viewing Zabbix appliance logs

The docker exec command allows you to run commands inside a Docker container. The following command line will give you a bash shell inside your zabbix-appliance container:

$ docker exec -ti some-zabbix-appliance /bin/bash

The Zabbix appliance logs is available through Docker's container log:

$ docker logs some-zabbix-appliance

Environment Variables

When you start the zabbix-appliance image, you can adjust the configuration of the Zabbix appliance by passing one or more environment variables on the docker run command line.

PHP_TZ

The variable is timezone in PHP format. Full list of supported timezones are available on php.net. By default, value is 'Europe/Riga'.

ZBX_LOADMODULE

The variable is list of comma separated loadable Zabbix modules. It works with volume /var/lib/zabbix/modules. The syntax of the variable is dummy1.so,dummy2.so.

ZBX_DEBUGLEVEL

The variable is used to specify debug level. By default, value is 3. It is DebugLevel parameter in zabbix_server.conf. Allowed values are listed below:

• 0 - basic information about starting and stopping of Zabbix processes;
• 1 - critical information
• 2 - error information
• 3 - warnings
• 4 - for debugging (produces lots of information)
• 5 - extended debugging (produces even more information)

ZBX_TIMEOUT

The variable is used to specify timeout for processing checks. By default, value is 4.

ZBX_SERVER_NAME

The variable is visible Zabbix installation name in right top corner of the web interface.

ZBX_MAXEXECUTIONTIME

The varable is PHP max_execution_time option. By default, value is 300.

ZBX_MEMORYLIMIT

The varable is PHP memory_limit option. By default, value is 128M.

ZBX_POSTMAXSIZE

The varable is PHP post_max_size option. By default, value is 16M.

ZBX_UPLOADMAXFILESIZE

The varable is PHP upload_max_filesize option. By default, value is 2M.

ZBX_MAXINPUTTIME

The varable is PHP max_input_time option. By default, value is 300.

ZBX_SESSION_NAME

The variable is Zabbix frontend definition. String used as the name of the Zabbix frontend session cookie. By default, value is zbx_sessionid.

Other variables

Additionally the image allows to specify many other environment variables listed below:

ZBX_LISTENIP=
ZBX_STARTPOLLERS=5
ZBX_IPMIPOLLERS=0
ZBX_STARTPOLLERSUNREACHABLE=1
ZBX_STARTTRAPPERS=5
ZBX_STARTPINGERS=1
ZBX_STARTDISCOVERERS=1
ZBX_STARTHTTPPOLLERS=1
ZBX_STARTTIMERS=1
ZBX_STARTESCALATORS=1
ZBX_STARTJAVAPOLLERS=5
ZBX_STARTVMWARECOLLECTORS=0
ZBX_VMWAREFREQUENCY=60
ZBX_VMWAREPERFFREQUENCY=60
ZBX_VMWARECACHESIZE=8M
ZBX_VMWARETIMEOUT=10
ZBX_ENABLE_SNMP_TRAPS=false
ZBX_SOURCEIP=
ZBX_HOUSEKEEPINGFREQUENCY=1
ZBX_MAXHOUSEKEEPERDELETE=5000
ZBX_SENDERFREQUENCY=30
ZBX_CACHESIZE=8M
ZBX_CACHEUPDATEFREQUENCY=60
ZBX_STARTDBSYNCERS=4
ZBX_HISTORYCACHESIZE=16M
ZBX_HISTORYINDEXCACHESIZE=4M
ZBX_TRENDCACHESIZE=4M
ZBX_VALUECACHESIZE=8M
ZBX_TRAPPERTIMEOUT=300
ZBX_UNREACHABLEPERIOD=45
ZBX_UNAVAILABLEDELAY=60
ZBX_UNREACHABLEDELAY=15
ZBX_LOGSLOWQUERIES=3000
ZBX_STARTPROXYPOLLERS=1
ZBX_PROXYCONFIGFREQUENCY=3600
ZBX_PROXYDATAFREQUENCY=1
ZBX_TLSCAFILE=
ZBX_TLSCRLFILE=
ZBX_TLSCERTFILE=
ZBX_TLSKEYFILE=

Default values of these variables are specified after equal sign.

The allowed variables are identical of parameters in official zabbix_server.conf. For example, ZBX_LOGSLOWQUERIES = LogSlowQueries.

Please use official documentation for zabbix_server.conf to get more information about the variables.

Allowed volumes for the Zabbix server container

/usr/lib/zabbix/alertscripts

The volume is used for custom alert scripts. It is AlertScriptsPath parameter in zabbix_server.conf.

/usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts

The volume is used by External checks (type of items). It is ExternalScripts parameter in zabbix_server.conf.

/var/lib/zabbix/modules

The volume allows load additional modules and extend Zabbix server using LoadModule feature.

/var/lib/zabbix/enc

The volume is used to store TLS related files. These file names are specified using ZBX_TLSCAFILE, ZBX_TLSCRLFILE, ZBX_TLSKEY_FILE and ZBX_TLSPSKFILE variables.

/var/lib/zabbix/ssh_keys

The volume is used as location of public and private keys for SSH checks and actions. It is SSHKeyLocation parameter in zabbix_server.conf.

/var/lib/zabbix/ssl/certs

The volume is used as location of of SSL client certificate files for client authentication. It is SSLCertLocation parameter in zabbix_server.conf.

/var/lib/zabbix/ssl/keys

The volume is used as location of SSL private key files for client authentication. It is SSLKeyLocation parameter in zabbix_server.conf.

/var/lib/zabbix/ssl/ssl_ca

The volume is used as location of certificate authority (CA) files for SSL server certificate verification. It is SSLCALocation parameter in zabbix_server.conf.

/var/lib/zabbix/snmptraps

The volume is used as location of snmptraps.log file. It could be shared by zabbix-snmptraps container and inherited using volumes_from Docker option while creating new instance of Zabbix server. SNMP traps processing feature could be enabled using shared volume and switched ZBX_ENABLE_SNMP_TRAPS environment variable to true.

/var/lib/zabbix/mibs

The volume allows to add new MIB files. It does not support subdirectories, all MIBs must be placed to /var/lib/zabbix/mibs.

/etc/ssl/nginx

The volume allows to enable HTTPS for the Zabbix web interface. The volume must contains three files ssl.crt, ssl.key and dhparam.pem prepared for Nginx SSL connections.

Please follow official Nginx documentation to get more details about how to create certificate files.

The image variants

The zabbix-appliance images come in many flavors, each designed for a specific use case.

zabbix-appliance:ubuntu-<version>

This is the defacto image. If you are unsure about what your needs are, you probably want to use this one. It is designed to be used both as a throw away container (mount your source code and start the container to start your app), as well as the base to build other images off of.

zabbix-appliance:alpine-<version>

This image is based on the popular Alpine Linux project, available in the alpine official image. Alpine Linux is much smaller than most distribution base images (~5MB), and thus leads to much slimmer images in general.

This variant is highly recommended when final image size being as small as possible is desired. The main caveat to note is that it does use musl libc instead of glibc and friends, so certain software might run into issues depending on the depth of their libc requirements. However, most software doesn't have an issue with this, so this variant is usually a very safe choice. See this Hacker News comment thread for more discussion of the issues that might arise and some pro/con comparisons of using Alpine-based images.

To minimize image size, it's uncommon for additional related tools (such as git or bash) to be included in Alpine-based images. Using this image as a base, add the things you need in your own Dockerfile (see the alpine image description for examples of how to install packages if you are unfamiliar).

Supported Docker versions

This image is officially supported on Docker version 1.12.0.

Support for older versions (down to 1.6) is provided on a best-effort basis.

Please see the Docker installation documentation for details on how to upgrade your Docker daemon.

User Feedback

Documentation

Documentation for this image is stored in the zabbix-appliance/ directory of the zabbix/zabbix-docker GitHub repo. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the repository's README.md file before attempting a pull request.

Issues

If you have any problems with or questions about this image, please contact us through a GitHub issue.

Known issues

Some configuration environment variables are the same between multiple Zabbix components. Be careful when change these variables.

Contributing

You are invited to contribute new features, fixes, or updates, large or small; we are always thrilled to receive pull requests, and do our best to process them as fast as we can.

Before you start to code, we recommend discussing your plans through a GitHub issue, especially for more ambitious contributions. This gives other contributors a chance to point you in the right direction, give you feedback on your design, and help you find out if someone else is working on the same thing.