zabbix70

If you wonder why I've been so silent lately, it's because of I had my personal maintenance window going on for a month. In other words, I enjoyed my summer holiday. 

While I was away from keyboard, the nice fellows at InitMAX sent me two more pro versions of their custom Zabbix 7.0 widgets: gaugeMAX and ItemMAX. I'll create separate blog posts about them and today start with gaugeMAX.

Zabbix 7.0 is fast. Not only it is fast for the new performance it gained underneath, but it also feels fast even on a Raspberry Pi 4.

Me being me, the following truly is an idea brought to you by Bad Idea Panda. Please, please do not try this at home. Or actually, DO try this at home, or any lab, but under any circumstances, DO NOT try this in production. Clear? Clear. Good, let's continue.

Zabbix 7.0 custom widgets game is on! The wonderful team at initMAX gave me access to Pro versions of their new Zabbix 7.0 widgets, so of course I'm now testing them in my own style. The first widget I got my hands on is Message of the Day.

Earlier this week, I immediately installed Zabbix 7.0beta3 when it came out. Back then I quickly tried out the new Honeycomb widget with some actual data.

As a regular follower of a weird gaming channel Let's Game It Out on YouTube, I couldn't resist thinking in that channel host Josh voice in my head saying "I wonder if there's a limit..." (to the number of elements you can have on Honeycomb widget).

Select ALL the things!

My What's up, home? Zabbix is very small, with only 3172 active items.

Zabbix 7.0beta3 got released today, so of course I immediately updated my What's up, home? environment to run it. Like usual, the update process was seamless and fast, going through everything in about a minute with my Raspberry Pi 4. 

As I updated Zabbix maybe ten minutes ago, these are very real-time impressions of the new version.

I was supposed to show you some dashboard creation, but Zabbix 7.0beta2 came out today and of course I had to update to it. The update itself was just as uneventful as I hoped -- with my Raspberry Pi, the whole process went through in about a minute. This blog post is probably among the shortest I have ever made, but the one new feature made me post this immediately. There are other new features like still more performance tuning under the hood, smaller cosmetic changes such as new icons, but the one that got me excited is...

As Zabbix 7.0 will come with the new widget framework, allowing communication between different widgets on dashboards, of course I had to try it out. 

Creating the module

The blog post title is a bit of a clickbait in a sense that this example is just 1:1 from Zabbix Summit 2023 custom widgets workshop session. I made some very, very minor modifications to code, mainly just changed my name and so on to manifest.json files. Since the code itself was obtained from the workshop session, I'm not going to publish it, but this much I will tease: