Installing Zabbix 3 on a Raspberry Pi

For those of you out there unfamiliar with Zabbix - it's a pretty awesome Open Source monitoring platform. It's really customisable and allows you to create some pretty nifty dashboards.Check out their website for more info. So, to start with I'm using a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B with Raspbian Jessie installed.

Install Prerequisites

First off we need to install install all Zabbix prerequisites. To install, open up a terminal or SSH into your Pi.

sudo apt-get install \
    mysql-server \
    php5 \
    apache2 \
    php5-gd \
    php5-mysql \
    php5-ldap \
    snmpd \
    libiksemel3 \
    libodbc1 \
    libopenipmi0 \
    fping \
    ttf-dejavu-core \
    ttf-japanese-gothic

When prompted, enter the root user password for MySQL and write it down somewhere.

Install Zabbix 3 Packages

Luckily for us someone has compiled the Zabbix 3 packages for the Raspberry Pi over at https://github.com/imkebe/zabbix3-rpi, so we don't need to compile it ourselves. Again, bring up a console, and let's dive in.

cd ~
wget https://github.com/imkebe/zabbix3-rpi/archive/master.zip

unzip master.zip
cd zabbix3-rpi-master
sudo dpkg -i zabbix-server-mysql_3.0.*+jessie_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i zabbix-frontend-php_3.0.*+jessie_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i zabbix-agent_3.0.*+jessie_armhf.deb
sudo service apache2 reload

Setup the Zabbix Database

Ok, so the Zabbix server stores all its data in a database... and we're using MySQL. These instructions are derived from the original Zabbix database documentation.

mysql -uroot -p<password> -e "create database zabbix character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;"
mysql -uroot -p<password> -e "grant all privileges on zabbix.* to zabbix@localhost identified by '<db-password>';"
zcat /usr/share/doc/zabbix-server-mysql/create.sql.gz | mysql -uzabbix -p<db-password> zabbix

Obviously you'll need to substitute <password> and <db-password>.

Configure Zabbix

We now need to let the server and front end how to connect to the database. To do this, we edit a bunch of config files. I'm going to use vi.

sudo vi /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf

Now, we edit the file. If you've used the defaults in this guide (database name zabbix and database user zabbix), all you need to do is uncomment the DBPassword entry and enter you zabbix database password.

DBPassword=<bd-password>

Next we set our time zone for the front-end. We edit

sudo vi /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/zabbix.conf

Uncomment the php_value date.timezone entry and enter your timezone. You can see http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php for supported timezones.

php_value date.timezone Australia/Sydney

Restart services so that our changes take.

sudo service apache2 restart
sudo service zabbix-server start
sudo service zabbix-agent start

Now we've setup the backend. We need to fire up our web browser and head over to http://<your-pi-ip-address>/zabbix or http://localhost/zabbix if you're using the Raspberry Pi desktop browser. Go through the screens until you get to the "Configure DB connection" section, where you just need to make sure you enter the correct database username and password.
Once the front end configuration is complete, we get the login screen.
The default user is 'Admin' with password 'zabbix'.