Hardware

Memory

Zabbix requires both physical and disk memory. The amount of required disk memory obviously depends on the number of hosts and parameters that are being monitored. If you're planning to keep a long history of monitored parameters, you should be thinking of at least a couple of gigabytes to have enough space to store the history in the database. Each Zabbix daemon process requires several connections to a database server. The amount of memory allocated for the connection depends on the configuration of the database engine.

The more physical memory you have, the faster the database (and therefore Zabbix) works.

Zabbix and especially Zabbix database may require significant CPU resources depending on number of monitored parameters and chosen database engine.

Other hardware

A serial communication port and a serial GSM modem are required for using SMS notification support in Zabbix. USB-to-serial converter will also work.

Examples of hardware configuration

The table provides examples of hardware configuration, assuming a Linux/BSD/Unix platform.

These are size and hardware configuration examples to start with. Each Zabbix installation is unique. Make sure to benchmark the performance of your Zabbix system in a staging or development environment, so that you can fully understand your requirements before deploying the Zabbix installation to its production environment.

MySQL Server,
Percona Server,
MariaDB Server,
PostgreSQL,
Oracle m6i.4xlarge/m6g.4xlarge Very large 1 000 000 MySQL Server,
Percona Server,
MariaDB Server,
PostgreSQL,
Oracle m6i.8xlarge/m6g.8xlarge

¹ 1 metric = 1 item + 1 trigger + 1 graph
² Example with Amazon general purpose EC2 instances, using ARM64 or x86_64 architecture, a proper instance type like Compute/Memory/Storage optimised should be selected during Zabbix installation evaluation and testing before installing in its production environment.

Actual configuration depends on the number of active items and refresh rates very much (see database size section of this page for details). It is highly recommended to run the database on a separate server for large installations.

Supported platforms

Due to security requirements and the mission-critical nature of the monitoring server, UNIX is the only operating system that can consistently deliver the necessary performance, fault tolerance, and resilience. Zabbix operates on market-leading versions.

Zabbix components are available and tested for the following platforms:

Platform Server Agent Agent2

Zabbix server/agent may work on other Unix-like operating systems as well. Zabbix agent is supported on all Windows desktop and server versions since XP (64-bit version). Zabbix agent will not work on AIX platforms below versions 6.1 TL07 / AIX 7.1 TL01.
To prevent critical security vulnerabilities in Zabbix agent 2, it is compiled only with supported Go releases . As of Go 1.21, the minimum required Windows versions are raised, therefore, the minimum Windows version for Zabbix agent 2 is Windows 10/Server 2016.

Zabbix disables core dumps if compiled with encryption and does not start if the system does not allow disabling of core dumps.

Required software

Zabbix is built around modern web servers, leading database engines, and PHP scripting language.

Third-party external surrounding software

If stated as mandatory, the required software/library is strictly necessary. Optional ones are needed for supporting some specific function.

One of 8.0.30-8.4.X Required if MySQL (or Percona) is used as Zabbix backend database. InnoDB engine is required.

Added support for MySQL versions:
- 8.4.X since Zabbix 7.0.1.

We recommend using the C API (libmysqlclient) library for building server/proxy. MariaDB 10.5.00-11.4.X InnoDB engine is required.

The recommended version is 10.5.

We recommend using the MariaDB Connector/C library for building server/proxy.

Added support for MariaDB versions:
- 11.4.X since Zabbix 7.0.1.

See also: Possible deadlocks with MariaDB . Oracle 19c - 21c Required if Oracle is used as Zabbix backend database.
The support for Oracle DB is deprecated since Zabbix 7.0. PostgreSQL 13.0-16.X Required if PostgreSQL is used as Zabbix backend database.
Depending on the installation size, it might be required to increase PostgreSQL work_mem configuration property (4MB being the default value), so that the amount of memory used by the database for particular operation is sufficient and query execution does not take too much time. TimescaleDB for PostgreSQL 2.1.0-2.15.X Required if TimescaleDB is used as a PostgreSQL database extension. Make sure to install TimescaleDB Community Edition, which supports compression.

Note that PostgreSQL 15 is supported since TimescaleDB 2.10.
You may also refer to the official documentation for details regarding PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB version compatibility.

Added support for TimescaleDB versions:
- 2.15.X since Zabbix 7.0.1. SQLite Optional 3.3.5-3.34.X SQLite is only supported with Zabbix proxies. Required if SQLite is used as Zabbix proxy database. smartmontools 7.1 or later Required for Zabbix agent 2. Required for the user count plugin. Required for the system.sw.packages plugin. pkgtool Required for the system.sw.packages plugin. Required for the system.sw.packages plugin. pacman Required for the system.sw.packages plugin. q applets qlist and qsize , as part of q applets , are required for the system.sw.packages plugin on Gentoo Linux.

Although Zabbix can work with databases available in the operating systems, for the best experience, we recommend using databases installed from the official database developer repositories.

Frontend

The minimum supported screen width for Zabbix frontend is 1200px.

If stated as mandatory, the required software/library is strictly necessary. Optional ones are needed for supporting some specific function.

2.0.28 or later PHP GD extension must support PNG images ( --with-png-dir ), JPEG ( --with-jpeg-dir ) images and FreeType 2 ( --with-freetype-dir ).
Version 2.3.0 or later might be required to avoid possible text overlapping in graphs for some frontend languages. bcmath php-bcmath ( --enable-bcmath ) ctype php-ctype ( --enable-ctype ) libXML 2.6.15 or later php-xml, if provided as a separate package by the distributor. xmlreader php-xmlreader, if provided as a separate package by the distributor. xmlwriter php-xmlwriter, if provided as a separate package by the distributor. session php-session, if provided as a separate package by the distributor. sockets php-net-socket ( --enable-sockets ). Required for user script support. mbstring php-mbstring ( --enable-mbstring ) gettext php-gettext ( --with-gettext ). Required for translations to work. php-ldap. Required only if LDAP authentication is used in the frontend. openssl php-openssl. Required only if SAML authentication is used in the frontend. mysqli Required if MySQL is used as Zabbix backend database. Required if Oracle is used as Zabbix backend database. pgsql Required if PostgreSQL is used as Zabbix backend database. php-curl. If not installed, the frontend will work as usual, however, the Duo Universal Prompt multi-factor authentication option will not be available.

Third-party frontend libraries that are supplied with Zabbix:

1.12.1 A set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of jQuery. OneLogin's SAML PHP Toolkit 4.0.0 A PHP toolkit that adds SAML 2.0 authentication support to be able to sign in to Zabbix. Symfony Yaml Component 5.1.0 Adds support to export and import Zabbix configuration elements in the YAML format.

For other fonts than the default DejaVu, PHP function imagerotate might be required. If it is missing, these fonts might be rendered incorrectly when a graph is displayed. This function is only available if PHP is compiled with bundled GD, which is not the case in Debian and other distributions.

Third-party libraries used for writing and debugging Zabbix frontend code:

2.4.1 An application-level package manager for PHP that provides a standard format for managing dependencies of PHP software and required libraries. PHPUnit 8.5.29 A PHP unit testing framework for testing Zabbix frontend. 3.4.22 A preprocessor scripting language that is interpreted and compiled into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Web browser on client side

Cookies and JavaScript must be enabled.

The latest stable versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, and Opera are supported.

The same-origin policy for IFrames is implemented, which means that Zabbix cannot be placed in frames on a different domain.
Still, pages placed into a Zabbix frame will have access to Zabbix frontend (through JavaScript) if the page that is placed in the frame and Zabbix frontend are on the same domain. A page like http://secure-zabbix.com/cms/page.html , if placed into dashboards on http://secure-zabbix.com/zabbix/ , will have full JS access to Zabbix.

Server/proxy

If stated as mandatory, the required software/library is strictly necessary. Optional ones are needed for supporting some specific function.

libpcre/libpcre2 One of PCRE/PCRE2 library is required for Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) support.
The naming may differ depending on the GNU/Linux distribution, for example 'libpcre3' or 'libpcre1'. PCRE v8.x and PCRE2 v10.x are supported. libevent Required for inter-process communication. Version 1.4 or higher. libevent-pthreads Required for inter-process communication. libpthread Required for mutex and read-write lock support (could be part of libc). libresolv Required for DNS resolution (could be part of libc). libiconv Required for text encoding/format conversion (could be part of libc). Mandatory for Zabbix server on Linux. Required for compression support. Math library. Required by Zabbix server only. libmysqlclient One of Required if MySQL is used. libmariadb Required if MariaDB is used. libclntsh Required if Oracle is used; libclntsh version must match or be higher than the version of the Oracle database used. libpq5 Required if PostgreSQL is used; libpq5 version must match or be higher than the version of the PostgreSQL database used. libsqlite3 Required if Sqlite is used. Required for Zabbix proxy only. libOpenIPMI Required for IPMI support. Required for Zabbix server only. libssh2 or libssh Required for SSH checks . Version 1.0 or higher (libssh2); 0.9.0 or higher (libssh). libcurl Required for web monitoring, VMware monitoring, SMTP authentication, web.page.* Zabbix agent items , HTTP agent items and Elasticsearch (if used). Version 7.19.1 or higher is required (7.28.0 or higher is recommended).
Libcurl version requirements:
- SMTP authentication: version 7.20.0 or higher
- Elasticsearch: version 7.28.0 or higher
To make use of upgraded cURL features, restart Zabbix server/proxy and agent (for web.page.* items). libxml2 Required for VMware monitoring and XML XPath preprocessing. net-snmp Required for SNMP support. Version 5.3.0 or higher.
Support of strong encryption protocols (AES192/AES192C, AES256/AES256C) is available starting with net-snmp library 5.8; on RHEL 8+ based systems it is recommended to use net-snmp 5.8.15 or later. libunixodbc Required for database monitoring. libgnutls or libopenssl Required when using encryption .
Minimum versions: libgnutls - 3.1.18, libopenssl - 1.0.1 libldap Required for LDAP support. fping Required for ICMP ping items .

Agent

libpcre/libpcre2 One of PCRE/PCRE2 library is required for Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) support.
The naming may differ depending on the GNU/Linux distribution, for example 'libpcre3' or 'libpcre1'. PCRE v8.x and PCRE2 v10.x are supported.
Required for log monitoring. Also required on Windows. libpthread Required for mutex and read-write lock support (could be part of libc). Not required on Windows. libresolv Required for DNS resolution (could be part of libc). Not required on Windows. libiconv Required for text encoding/format conversion to UTF-8 in log items, file content, file regex and regmatch items (could be part of libc). Not required on Windows. libgnutls or libopenssl Required if using encryption .
Minimum versions: libgnutls - 3.1.18, libopenssl - 1.0.1
On Microsoft Windows OpenSSL 1.1.1 or later is required. libldap Required if LDAP is used. Not supported on Windows. libcurl Required for web.page.* Zabbix agent items . Not supported on Windows.
Version 7.19.1 or higher is required (7.28.0 or higher is recommended).
To make use of upgraded cURL features, restart Zabbix agent. libmodbus Only required if Modbus monitoring is used.
Version 3.0 or higher.

Agent 2

libpcre/libpcre2 One of PCRE/PCRE2 library is required for Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) support.
The naming may differ depending on the GNU/Linux distribution, for example 'libpcre3' or 'libpcre1'. PCRE v8.x and PCRE2 v10.x are supported.
Required for log monitoring. Also required on Windows. libopenssl Required when using encryption.
OpenSSL 1.0.1 or later is required on UNIX platforms.
The OpenSSL library must have PSK support enabled. LibreSSL is not supported.
On Microsoft Windows systems OpenSSL 1.1.1 or later is required.

Go libraries

0.0.0 Go packages for low-level interactions with the operating system.
Also used in plugin support lib. Used in MongoDB and PostgreSQL plugins. github.com/Microsoft/go-winio On Windows.
Yes, indirect ¹ 0.6.0 Windows named pipe implementation.
Also used in plugin support lib. Used in MongoDB and PostgreSQL plugins. github.com/goburrow/serial Yes, indirect ¹ 0.1.0 Serial library for Modbus. golang.org/x/xerrors 0.0.0 Functions to manipulate errors. gopkg.in/asn1-ber.v1 1.0.0 Encoding/decoding library for ASN1 BER. github.com/go-stack/stack No, indirect ¹ 1.8.0 github.com/golang/snappy 0.0.1 github.com/klauspost/compress 1.13.6 github.com/xdg-go/pbkdf2 1.0.0 github.com/xdg-go/scram 1.0.2 github.com/xdg-go/stringprep 1.0.2 github.com/youmark/pkcs8 0.0.0

¹ "Indirect" means that it is used in one of the libraries that the agent uses. It's required since Zabbix uses the library that uses the package.

See also dependencies for loadable plugins:

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Java gateway

If you obtained Zabbix from the source repository or an archive, then the necessary dependencies are already included in the source tree.

If you obtained Zabbix from your distribution's package, then the necessary dependencies are already provided by the packaging system.

In both cases above, the software is ready to be used and no additional downloads are necessary.

If, however, you wish to provide your versions of these dependencies (for instance, if you are preparing a package for some Linux distribution), below is the list of library versions that Java gateway is known to work with. Zabbix may work with other versions of these libraries, too.

The following table lists JAR files that are currently bundled with Java gateway in the original code:

4.3r1 JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. This is the org.json compatible Android implementation extracted from the Android SDK. logback-classic 1.2.9 logback-core 1.2.9 slf4j-api 1.7.32

The port numbers should be open in firewall to enable Zabbix communications. Outgoing TCP connections usually do not require explicit firewall settings.

Database size

Zabbix configuration data require a fixed amount of disk space and do not grow much.

Zabbix database size mainly depends on these variables, which define the amount of stored historical data:

Number of processed values per second

This is the average number of new values Zabbix server receives every second. For example, if we have 3000 items for monitoring with a refresh rate of 60 seconds, the number of values per second is calculated as 3000/60 = 50 .

It means that 50 new values are added to Zabbix database every second.

Housekeeper settings for history

Zabbix keeps values for a fixed period of time, normally several weeks or months. Each new value requires a certain amount of disk space for data and index.

So, if we would like to keep 30 days of history and we receive 50 values per second, the total number of values will be around ( 30 *24*3600)* 50 = 129.600.000, or about 130M of values.

Depending on the database engine used, type of received values (floats, integers, strings, log files, etc), the disk space for keeping a single value may vary from 40 bytes to hundreds of bytes. Normally it is around 90 bytes per value for numeric items ² . In our case, it means that 130M of values will require 130M * 90 bytes = 10.9GB of disk space.

The size of text/log item values is impossible to predict exactly, but you may expect around 500 bytes per value.

Housekeeper setting for trends

Zabbix keeps a 1-hour max/min/avg/count set of values for each item in the table trends . The data is used for trending and long period graphs. The one hour period can not be customized.

Zabbix database, depending on the database type, requires about 90 bytes per each total. Suppose we would like to keep trend data for 5 years. Values for 3000 items will require 3000*24*365* 90 = 2.2GB per year, or 11GB for 5 years.

Housekeeper settings for events

Each Zabbix event requires approximately 250 bytes of disk space ¹ . It is hard to estimate the number of events generated by Zabbix daily. In the worst-case scenario, we may assume that Zabbix generates one event per second.

For each recovered event, an event_recovery record is created. Normally most of the events will be recovered so we can assume one event_recovery record per event. That means additional 80 bytes per event.

Optionally events can have tags, each tag record requiring approximately 100 bytes of disk space ¹ . The number of tags per event (#tags) depends on configuration. So each will need an additional #tags * 100 bytes of disk space.

It means that if we want to keep 3 years of events, this would require 3*365*24*3600* (250+80+#tags*100) = ~30GB +#tags*100B disk space ² .

¹ More when having non-ASCII event names, tags and values.
² The size approximations are based on MySQL and might be different for other databases.

The table contains formulas that can be used to calculate the disk space required for Zabbix system:

History days*(items/refresh rate)*24*3600*bytes
items : number of items
days : number of days to keep history
refresh rate : average refresh rate of items
bytes : number of bytes required to keep single value, depends on database engine, normally ~90 bytes. Trends days*(items/3600)*24*3600*bytes
items : number of items
days : number of days to keep history
bytes : number of bytes required to keep single trend, depends on the database engine, normally ~90 bytes. Events days*events*24*3600*bytes
events : number of event per second. One (1) event per second in worst-case scenario.
days : number of days to keep history
bytes : number of bytes required to keep single trend, depends on the database engine, normally ~330 + average number of tags per event * 100 bytes.

So, the total required disk space can be calculated as:
Configuration + History + Trends + Events
The disk space will NOT be used immediately after Zabbix installation. Database size will grow then it will stop growing at some point, which depends on housekeeper settings.

Time synchronization

It is very important to have precise system time on the server with Zabbix running. ntpd is the most popular daemon that synchronizes the host's time with the time of other machines. It's strongly recommended to maintain synchronized system time on all systems Zabbix components are running on.

Network requirements

A following list of open ports per component is applicable for default configuration.

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