1 Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS

Overview

This section provides the steps required for a successful upgrade from Zabbix 4.4.x to Zabbix 5.0.x using official Zabbix packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS.

While upgrading Zabbix agents is not mandatory (but recommended), Zabbix server and proxies must be of the same major version. Therefore, in a server-proxy setup, Zabbix server and all proxies have to be stopped and upgraded. Keeping proxies running during server upgrade no longer will bring any benefit as during proxy upgrade their old data will be discarded and no new data will be gathered until proxy configuration is synced with server.

Note that with SQLite database on proxies, history data from proxies before the upgrade will be lost, because SQLite database upgrade is not supported and the SQLite database file has to be manually removed. When proxy is started for the first time and the SQLite database file is missing, proxy creates it automatically.

Depending on database size the database upgrade to version 5.0 may take a long time.

Before the upgrade make sure to read the relevant upgrade notes!

RHEL/CentOS 7 users, be aware of PHP >= 7.2 version requirements when upgrading frontend!
Be sure to read relevant documentation!

The following upgrade notes are available:

You may also want to check the requirements for 5.0.

It may be handy to run two parallel SSH sessions during the upgrade, executing the upgrade steps in one and monitoring the server/proxy logs in another. For example, run tail -f zabbix_server.log or tail -f zabbix_proxy.log in the second SSH session showing you the latest log file entries and possible errors in real time. This can be critical for production instances.

Upgrade procedure

1 Stop Zabbix processes

Stop Zabbix server to make sure that no new data is inserted into database.

# systemctl stop zabbix-server

If upgrading the proxy, stop proxy too.

# systemctl stop zabbix-proxy

It is no longer possible to start the upgraded server and have older, yet unupgraded proxies report data to a newer server. This approach, which was never recommended nor supported by Zabbix, now is officially disabled when upgrading to 5.0 (or later) from any version before 4.4, as the server will ignore data from unupgraded proxies.

2 Back up the existing Zabbix database

This is a very important step. Make sure that you have a backup of your database. It will help if the upgrade procedure fails (lack of disk space, power off, any unexpected problem).

3 Back up configuration files, PHP files and Zabbix binaries

Make a backup copy of Zabbix binaries, configuration files and the PHP file directory.

Configuration files:

# mkdir /opt/zabbix-backup/
# cp /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf /opt/zabbix-backup/
# cp /etc/httpd/conf.d/zabbix.conf  /opt/zabbix-backup/

PHP files and Zabbix binaries:

# cp -R /usr/share/zabbix/ /opt/zabbix-backup/
# cp -R /usr/share/doc/zabbix-* /opt/zabbix-backup/

4 Update repository configuration package

To proceed with the upgrade your current repository package has to be updated.

RHEL/CentOS 8

# rpm -Uvh https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/5.0/rhel/8/x86_64/zabbix-release-5.0-1.el8.noarch.rpm

RHEL/CentOS 7

# rpm -Uvh https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/5.0/rhel/7/x86_64/zabbix-release-5.0-1.el7.noarch.rpm

5 Upgrade Zabbix components

To upgrade Zabbix components you may run something like:

# yum upgrade zabbix-server-mysql zabbix-web-mysql zabbix-agent

If using PostgreSQL, substitute mysql with pgsql in the command. If upgrading the proxy, substitute server with proxy in the command. If upgrading the agent 2, substitute zabbix-agent with zabbix-agent2 in the command.

To upgrade the web frontend with Apache on RHEL 8 correctly, also run:

# yum install zabbix-apache-conf

and make the necessary changes to this file.

To upgrade the web frontend on RHEL 7 follow instructions on this page (extra steps are required to install PHP 7.2 or newer).
In particular, make sure to install zabbix-apache-conf-scl package if you use Apache web server.

 # yum install zabbix-apache-conf-scl

6 Review component configuration parameters

See the upgrade notes for details on mandatory changes.

7 Start Zabbix processes

Start the updated Zabbix components.

# systemctl start zabbix-server
# systemctl start zabbix-proxy
# systemctl start zabbix-agent
# systemctl start zabbix-agent2

8 Clear web browser cookies and cache

After the upgrade you may need to clear web browser cookies and web browser cache for the Zabbix web interface to work properly.

Upgrade between minor versions

It is possible to upgrade between minor versions of 5.0.x (for example, from 5.0.1 to 5.0.3). Upgrading between minor versions is easy.

To execute Zabbix minor version upgrade it is required to run:

$ sudo yum upgrade 'zabbix-*'

To execute Zabbix server minor version upgrade run:

$ sudo yum upgrade 'zabbix-server-*'

To execute Zabbix agent minor version upgrade run:

$ sudo yum upgrade 'zabbix-agent-*'

or, for Zabbix agent 2:

$ sudo yum upgrade 'zabbix-agent2-*'

Note that you may also use ‘update’ instead of ‘upgrade’ in these commands. While ‘upgrade’ will delete obsolete packages, ‘update’ will preserve them.