Zabbix

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring platform for networks, servers, cloud services, and applications. It collects metrics through agents, SNMP, IPMI, and agentless checks, then provides alerting, visualization, and dashboards from a single web frontend. This image ships the Zabbix server, web frontend, and agent with a MySQL backend on Apache.

Software included

Component	Version
Zabbix	7.0 (LTS)
MySQL	8.0
Apache	2.4.x
Ubuntu	24.04 LTS

Requirements

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
vCPU	2	4
RAM	2 GB	4 GB
Storage	30 GB	60 GB

Environment variables

This image takes no deploy-time variables. It creates no shared administrator password. Zabbix ships with a default Admin password, and first boot replaces it with a value unique to your VM.

Getting started

1. Connect to your VM

ssh ubuntu@<your-vm-ip>

2. Wait for first-boot configuration

On the first boot, a setup script initialises MySQL, imports the Zabbix schema, writes the frontend configuration, starts the services, and rotates the default Admin password. Track progress:

journalctl -u zabbix-first-boot.service -f

The login message (MOTD) confirms when Zabbix is ready.

3. Retrieve the admin password

The credentials are written to a root-only file:

sudo cat /root/.credentials/zabbix.txt

4. Open the web frontend

Open a browser and navigate to:

http://<your-vm-ip>/zabbix/

Managing Zabbix

# Check status
sudo systemctl status zabbix-server apache2 mysql

# Restart the server
sudo systemctl restart zabbix-server

# View logs
sudo tail -f /var/log/zabbix/zabbix_server.log

Server configuration lives in /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf and the frontend configuration in /etc/zabbix/web/.

Security

Port 80 (web frontend) and port 10051 (Zabbix server, used by agents to report in) are open on the VM’s network interface. UFW is enabled and allows those ports plus SSH (port 22).

To restrict the web frontend to a specific IP:

sudo ufw delete allow 80/tcp
sudo ufw allow from <trusted-ip> to any port 80

For production use, point a DNS record at the VM and front Apache with TLS, either with your own certificate or a reverse proxy that terminates TLS.