Is Raspberry Pi 4 a goodbye or good buy for running Zabbix? How is it performance-wise? Is it reliable? Here's my nine months review of it, with a splash of appliance/application performance monitoring.
After in about April 2022 when it became clear that I am going to continue my home monitoring project, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 to run the show. Here's my opinion how well it is suited for running Zabbix.
Installing Zabbix
Applying that delicious layer of Zabbix on top of your Raspberry Pi 4 cake is extremely straightforward, as just like for every other platform that Zabbix officially supports, they do have packages and instructions to setup you'd like to run.
After installing the packages, the next steps are just like with Zabbix running on any other platform, so I am not going to dive into that now.
Modifications to my Raspberry setup
As I do not need to run graphical environment on my Raspberry, I did disable the graphical environment from starting at all to save some precious RAM and other resources.
After some time I did also purchase an external USB hard disk, as the memory card from where Raspberry Pi 4 runs its OS is not very snappy especially with write operations and can also run tight on free space.
Other than that, my Raspberry Pi 4 is running pretty much on defaults.
How about the performance?
The graphs that you are about to see are from nine months period of time, as that's about as long I have had the device.
Splash of APM
Have you ever wondered what happens to a memory usage of a wrapper shell script that runs other scripts in loop and keeps doing that until it's manually stopped? This happens, it's boringly stable. The results are brought you to by Zabbix Agent 2 process discovery.
There's more than that to process discovery, but those were some examples.
My conclusion: Raspberry Pi 4 is an excellent Zabbix server for smaller environments and a very good Zabbix proxy candidate. It's been rock solid.
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