Step by Step to Install Zabbix (RHEL/CentOS)

Zabbix is an Enterprise-level software designed for monitoring availability and performance of IT infrastructure components that can scale to monitor more than 100,000 devices. Zabbix is open source and comes at no cost. It monitors performance and availability of servers, WEB applications, databases, networking equipment and more in your Data Center. Zabbix is considered one of the top open source infrastructure monitoring tools which we introduced in a previous article.

For more information visit: http://www.zabbix.com/ and check our YouTube video introducing Zabbix

The main components of Zabbix are:

Web Frontend: A PHP-enabled web server.
Zabbix Server: It is the central component to which Zabbix agents and proxies report data on availability and integrity of systems. The server can itself remotely check networked services (such as web servers and mail servers) using simple service checks.
Zabbix Database: Collected data and configuration information for Zabbix is stored in the database, which both the server and the web frontend interact with.
Zabbix Agent: The Zabbix agent is deployed on a monitoring target to actively monitor local resources and applications. Zabbix agents can perform passive (Pull) and active checks (Push).
Zabbix Proxy: A Zabbix proxy can be used in remote and restricted areas to collect performance and availability data on behalf of the Zabbix server.

The Zabbix proxy will not be included in this installation, but will be covered in a dedicated article in the future.

Step 2: Install and configure the Zabbix database

We are going to use mariadb as our Zabbix backend database, but you can use any supported Zabbix database (MySQL,PostgresSQL,Oracle, IBM DB2, SQLite).

Install DB (mariadb)

yum install mariadb-server -y

Start and check the status of mariadb. The chkconfig command is used to ensure mariadb will start after reboot.

chkconfig mariadb on
systemctl start mariadb
systemctl status mariadb

Configure the Zabbix Database

Connect to mariadb as the root and create the zabbix db. Here we are using the default “root” and no password for our database user. In your production environment, make sure to secure the database using the “mysql_secure_installation” command.

mysql

The database name we will create in our example is going to be zabbix: you can create your own name.

create database zabbix character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;
show databases;

Granting privileges to the database user “zabbix”.

grant all privileges on zabbix.* to zabbix@localhost identified by 'zabbix';
quit;

Step 3: Install and configure the Zabbix server

Install the Zabbix Server Package

yum install zabbix-server-mysql

Load the Zabbix database schema and initial data

The Zabbix server version installed from the previous step was “zabbix-server-mysql-3.0.9”. Always check what Zabbix version was installed under/usr/sahre/doc/.

cd /usr/share/doc/zabbix-server-mysql-3.0.9/
zcat ./create.sql.gz | mysql zabbix

Configure DB settings in the in zabbix_server.conf

You only need to change the “DBPassword” and you can keep all default settings if you choose the same zabbix DB and username (DBHost,DBUser,DBName). Otherwise, use the name you used when you created the db. In the “zabbix_server.conf” file, change the “DBPassword=zabbix” and save the file.
.

vi /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf

Start the Zabbix-Server and check its status

systemctl start zabbix-server
systemctl status zabbix-server
ps ax | grep zabbix_server
tail /var/log/zabbix/zabbix_server.log

Step 4: Install and configure the Zabbix frontend (WEB GUI)

Install the Zabbix frontend package

yum install zabbix-web-mysql -y

Modify the PHP time zone

Modify the “php_value date.timezone” in this “zabbix.conf” file to reflect your time zone. In our setup, we will use the php_value date.timezone America/Toronto. A full list of all the PHP time zones can be accessed from here.

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/zabbix.conf

Start Apache

chkconfig httpd on
systemctl start httpd
systemctl status httpd

Configure the Zabbix UI

Open your browser “http://Your server hostname or IP/zabbix” to access and do the basic setup for the Zabbix UI.