Zabbix 8.0 LTS: Exclusive Sneak Peek from Zabbix Conference Latam
Last week, some of you might have felt a little disappointed with the latest Beta 8 of Zabbix. We all expected to see some of those juicy features we had been waiting for a long time. But don't worry—today, we are going to do some "gossip" and dive deep into the future of our favorite monitoring tool.
Based on the recent presentation by Alexei Vladishev, the CEO and main mind behind Zabbix, at the Zabbix Conference 2026 in Latin America, I want to show off what truly awaits us in the final release of Zabbix 8.0 LTS. There are things in here that even I didn't know about, so let's unpack this massive update together!
The Vision: An All-in-One, Open-Source Powerhouse
Alexei reiterated a core philosophy that I absolutely love: Zabbix is designed to be an all-in-one solution that embraces both the IT and OT (Operational Technology) worlds. In an era full of strange corporate acquisitions and unclear licensing changes, Zabbix remains committed to being a top-tier, free, and open-source software. They are heavily focused on product quality, security, and affordability.
Since Zabbix 8.0 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, it will receive 5 years of support. That means the team is pushing hard to introduce their most important and stable features right now.
Out-of-the-Box Experience & Cloud Monitoring
We all know the beauty of Zabbix lies in its templates. You install the system, apply a template, and you're monitoring devices instantly. In version 8.0, Zabbix is aggressively extending its coverage:
- Extended Public Cloud Coverage: Enhancements for AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud, including multi-cloud solutions and crucial cloud cost monitoring.
- Enterprise Hardware & Virtualization: With many companies migrating away from VMware, Zabbix is putting a heavy focus on Hyper-V and Proxmox (the low-budget virtualization alternative).
- Databases & Services: Improved templates for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and Percona.
- AI Usage Monitoring: You can now monitor the costs and performance of external AI engines like OpenAI, Claude, and Copilot!
- Domain Expiration Monitoring: Native monitoring via RDAP to keep track of those easily forgotten Windows and HTTP certificates.
Artificial Intelligence Done Right
Everyone is shoving AI into their products these days, but Zabbix is taking a smart, calculated approach. Instead of relying on gimmicky chatbots that waste API tokens, Zabbix is integrating AI through the official MCP (Model Context Protocol).
This means we will get AI-based functionality built directly into Zabbix for tasks like helpers, usability enhancements, and analytics. If Zabbix takes care of the perfection and utility of these tools natively, it will be significantly more useful than the third-party workarounds we've seen so far.
CEP (Complex Event Processing) & SIEM Capabilities
This is arguably one of the most exciting features! Zabbix is introducing CEP (Complex Event Processing), which splits into two main threads:
- Single Event Processing: Filtering, normalization, tag and severity manipulation, suppressing old events, and data anonymization.
- Multiple Event Processing: This is where the magic happens. It allows for root cause and symptom analysis, deduplication, time-window-based logic, complex pattern matching, and even JavaScript logic for data enrichment.
By enriching events with external API data and correlating them, Zabbix 8.0 can effectively enable SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) capabilities. While it won't replace a dedicated SIEM entirely, it will massively reduce noise and provide faster detection and better insights.
Observability & APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
Zabbix is evolving from traditional monitoring into full-blown Observability. The goal is to ingest millions of unstructured data points—like OpenTelemetry traces, NetFlow, JFlow, and system logs—and normalize them into a new JSON type.
We are getting a brand-new APM menu in the UI, featuring dedicated sections for Traces, Metrics, and Logs. To handle this massive stream of data at scale, Zabbix is updating its architecture:
- Standard Databases: MySQL and PostgreSQL can handle up to 100K NVPS (New Values Per Second) with JSON data.
- Big Data Scaling: For environments needing more than 1M NVPS, Zabbix will integrate with ClickHouse and Elastic.
- Cloud-Native Architecture: Zabbix Proxies will now act as telemetry data collectors, writing OpenTelemetry and streaming data directly to the History Database (ClickHouse/Elastic), bypassing the Zabbix Server to avoid bottlenecks!
UI, Dashboards, and Quality of Life Improvements
The web interface in Zabbix 8.0 is getting a refreshed look and feel, with massive accessibility and UX improvements:
- Customizable Data Views: You can now resize, hide, and customize columns dynamically. Even better, you can create columns using User Macros or Global Macros (e.g., combining
{INVENTORY.LOCATION.LAT}and{INVENTORY.LOCATION.LON}into a single custom text column). - Separation of Filters and Display Options: Display settings (like showing operational data or tags) have been moved to the three dots on the column headers, allowing you to save presets for a truly custom experience.
- Interactive Dashboards & Scatterplots: The Scatterplot widget is a game-changer! You can now correlate two metrics (like IOPS vs. Disk Latency). Clicking a point on the scatterplot will dynamically update other widgets on your dashboard to show correlations with CPU or memory usage.
- Inherited Tags: You can finally see where tags are inherited from (e.g., Template vs. Host) directly in the configuration screens.
- Dashboard Zoom & Import/Export: Maximize single widgets easily and import/export entire dashboards!
Automatic HA Failover for PostgreSQL
Say goodbye to complex load balancers like HAProxy for your databases! Zabbix 8.0 introduces native support for multiple PostgreSQL backends. You simply define multiple hosts separated by commas, and Zabbix will automatically test them in order until a read-write connection is established. If the primary node dies, Zabbix handles the failover seamlessly. This dramatically lightens the architecture for High Availability setups.
The Zabbix Mobile App & Secure Gateway
Finally, Zabbix is launching a robust Mobile Application for iOS and Android. It features instant push notifications and an aggregated view of multiple Zabbix servers. But the best part? They are introducing a Secure Gateway. This ensures that communication between your on-premise Zabbix (behind a firewall) and your mobile app is fully encrypted by your server, keeping your data entirely private and secure.
Let's Discuss!
Zabbix 8.0 LTS is shaping up to be a monumental release, bridging the gap between standard infrastructure monitoring and modern observability. The design is getting clearer, the performance is scaling beautifully, and the new features are exactly what enterprise environments need.
But I want to know what you think! Did I miss a specific use case you are excited about? Do you have unique requirements that these new features will solve? Let me know down in the comments—your feedback is crucial for evolving the Zabbix community.
If you enjoyed this breakdown, make sure to check out my YouTube channel for the full video and more tutorials. See you next week!
A big greeting from Dimitri, bye everyone!
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