We recently covered the most desirable feature request in Zabbix – ability to tell an item to collect a value right now, instead of waiting for the next polling interval. But there are many more feature requests – actually, there are almost 2000 open feature requests. Let’s look at TOP20 out of those, and let’s figure out what’s the second most desirable thing to be implemented for Zabbix.

TOP20 Zabbix feature requests, January 2017
Zabbix uses Jira for issue tracking, including bugreports and feature requests. These issues can be voted on, and a large amount of votes on a feature request indicate that majority of users are missing that feature. The leader here is the ability to force item polling, but there are many more. Knowing what those are can be helpful – for example:
- when evaluating Zabbix, as you can easily see what crucial features might be still missing
- these feature requests can also be useful for existing Zabbix users, as the issues often will contain workarounds.
Here’s a list of the 20 most important missing features, according to Zabbix users:
Place | Issue | Description | Reporter | Created | Votes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | ZBXNEXT-473 | Ability to Check Now a specific passive item | Robert Hau | 2010-08-17 | 174 |
2 | ZBXNEXT-927 | Allow LLD Graphs to graph an item for each discovered entity in a single graph | Andrew Howell | 2011-08-29 | 150 |
3 | ZBXNEXT-104 | switch trigger to OK based on acknowledgement by user | David M. Zendzian | 2009-10-23 | 139 |
4 | ZBXNEXT-46 | Host based dependencies | Ankur Sethi | 2009-08-09 | 134 |
5 | ZBXNEXT-97 | ability to test an action in frontend | Christoph Haas | 2009-10-06 | 116 |
6 | ZBXNEXT-936 | Zabbix Proxy does not proxy remote commands | Jordi Clariana | 2009-11-02 | 115 |
7 | ZBXNEXT-413 | Maintenance Period on Trigger/service level | Florian Koch | 2010-06-17 | 100 |
8 | ZBXNEXT-276 | LDAP authentication with groups support | Roberto Rios | 2010-03-17 | 94 |
9 | ZBXNEXT-1262 | nested host groups | richlv | 2012-06-13 | 93 |
10 | ZBXNEXT-77 | Better permission granularity | Johan Segernas | 2009-09-15 | 88 |
11 | ZBXNEXT-18 | send an alert after trigger being acknowledged | Sol Arioto | 2009-02-09 | 85 |
12 | ZBXNEXT-117 | Add comments to graphs | Robin Holtet | 2009-11-04 | 74 |
13 | ZBXNEXT-1274 | Configurable JMX Endpoint | michael | 2012-06-15 | 73 |
14 | ZBXNEXT-75 | Add a "show all" option for viewing all graphs for a host on one page" | Jasper Spit | 2008-09-29 | 73 |
15 | ZBXNEXT-247 | Built in feature to export reports and statistics | Emil Odepark | 2010-02-22 | 61 |
16 | ZBXNEXT-336 | ability to customise inventory fields | richlv | 2010-04-29 | 61 |
17 | ZBXNEXT-10 | Need a command-line import/export facility | Marty Shannon | 2008-01-14 | 57 |
18 | ZBXNEXT-158 | ability to use discovery returned string as hostname | richlv | 2009-12-08 | 56 |
19 | ZBXNEXT-714 | need scalable alternative for the history and items tables | Will Lowe | 2011-03-24 | 53 |
20 | ZBXNEXT-2088 | Allow merging of discovered VM's and data from an installed agent | Gene Liverman | 2013-12-24 | 51 |
While there might be some overlap and duplication between all the open issues, in general Zabbix team does a good job at closing duplicates and cross-referencing related issues, thus the list above should be pretty correct. If you do spot a duplicate, please do speak up 🙂
Creating “summary” LLD graphs
And in the second place we have ZBXNEXT-927, which asks for a way to graph all LLD-discovered entities in a single graph. What is it that cannot be done currently? While LLD allows to create graph for each discovered entity – for example, a graph with incoming and outgoing traffic for each interface – there is no way to track some item across all discovered entities – for example, error count across all discovered interfaces. One could use ad-hoc graphs for one-off cases, or create custom graphs manually, but that is not feasible for anything above a few hosts.
Workaround
While there is no simple and easy workaround, the best way to approach this currently is using the Zabbix API to generate such graphs. Stay tuned, we will soon explore an example script to automatically create graphs with items like these 🙂