How to Install Zabbix on Ubuntu 24.04 and Configure it

In this tutorial, you will install the Zabbix on an Ubuntu 24.04 server, and configure a MariaDB database, in which Zabbix will store its monitoring data. You will also configure Nginx and PHP on this monitoring server to serve the Zabbix web interface.

Introduction

Zabbix is an open-source Linux management software that monitors the availability and performance of IT infrastructure components. Zabbix provides real-time monitoring of thousands of metric data from servers, virtual machines, network devices, and web applications. Analyzing the data Zabbix gathers will give you a general idea of the health of your servers and web applications, in addition to helping you detect potential problems before your users report them. To monitor a server and collect data from it, Zabbix uses an agent that gathers data from different services and sends it to the Zabbix monitoring server. Zabbix supports encrypted communication between the monitoring server and its monitored clients. This ensures that your data is transferred securely over the network. Zabbix provides a web interface that allows you to monitor your servers (also known as Zabbix clients) and their internal services and manage system settings.

Installing Zabbix on Ubuntu 24.04

To install Zabbix 7 on Ubuntu 24.04, you'll first download the Zabbix repository configuration package, install the Zabbix web frontend with MariaDB database support, Zabbix server, and Zabbix Nginx configuration packages. Next, you'll configure MariaDB for Zabbix, set up Nginx and PHP, then finish up your Zabbix installation through the Zabbix web interface.

Note

If you want to skip all the technical steps of setting up Zabbix on your server and have it installed in minutes, then I have some great news for you! Our team of engineers has prepared a ready-to-use 1-click Zabbix application for your convenience. Just choose one of our servers, and while prompted to choose the operating system, choose Zabbix from the dropdown menu.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial you need:

• An Ubuntu 24.04 server with a non-root user with sudo privileges.  If you haven't noticed, we offer extremely powerful Ubuntu 24.04 VPS servers at a bargain. Take a look at our offerings and prepare for your mind to be blown 🤯.
• The LEMP stack (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, and PHP) installed on your server. Use our Installing LEMP on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS guide to set it up. Or you can use our LEMP 1-Click App to set up LEMP automatically when creating a server.
• A TLS/SSL certificate, because Zabbix can access sensitive information about your infrastructure. Fun fact: All our 1-click applications (including LEMP and Zabbix) come preinstalled with an SSL certificate 🙂

Check out our How to access your server using SSH guide to learn how to access your server and create a sudo user.

Step 1: Installing the Zabbix Server

You first need to install Zabbix onto the server where MariaDB and Nginx should be already be installed. Zabbix offers installation packages for different Linux distributions. Zabbix can be found in Ubuntu's package manager, but it is outdated. To install the most recent stable version, use the official Zabbix repository. To download and install the latest Zabbix server, first get the Zabbix repository configuration package. This can be done by downloading the Zabbix.deb file using the wget command. This .deb file will be used to add the repository. Run the following command:

wget https://repo.zabbix.com/zabbix/7.0/ubuntu/pool/main/z/zabbix-release/zabbix-release_7.0-2+ubuntu24.04_all.deb

Once the download finishes, you can install it with the dpkg command:

sudo dpkg -i zabbix-release_7.0-2+ubuntu24.04_all.deb

After you run the command above, you will see an output like this: Next, refresh the package index to use this new repository:

sudo apt update

You should see the following as part of the output: We are now able to install Zabbix after our server has been updated. Next, we will install the Zabbix web frontend with MySQL database support and the Zabbix server. Note that we will be using MariaDB, but because its compatible with MySQL, you can just install the MySQL packages and they will work as expected:

sudo apt install zabbix-server-mysql zabbix-frontend-php zabbix-sql-scripts

Here you install the following packages:

• zabbix-server-mysql: Adds MySQL/MariaDB support to zabbix.
• zabbix-frontend-php: The PHP Zabbix web interface.
• zabbix-sql-scripts: Zabbix SQL scripts that will create the Zabbix database and its tables.

This command's will take some time to run. Below are the last few lines of the output: Finally, install the Zabbix Agent, which allows you to collect data about the Zabbix server status.

sudo apt install zabbix-agent

An output similar to the following will signify a successful installation: To use Zabbix, you must first set up a database that stores the data the Zabbix server will gather from its agents (also known as Zabbix clients). This is the next step.

Step 2: Configuring MariaDB

To configure Zabbix with a functional database, you will need to create a MariaDB database and fill it with basic information. To ensure that Zabbix doesn't log in to your MariaDB database using the root account, you will also create a unique user for this database. To create a MySQL/MariaDB database, use the mysql client to connect to MariaDB and access its command line interface with the following command:

sudo mysql

If you get an error that contains