On 7 April 2001 Alexei Vladishev released Zabbix under the GPL. An internal tool became a project. The stable 1.0 arrived only on 23 March 2004. In April 2005 SIA Zabbix was born in Riga, Latvia. Twenty-one years as a company (anniversary on 12 April 2025), twenty-five years of code. On 25 August 2026, 7.4.14 and 7.0.30 LTS were released. 8.0 LTS is already in beta, with CEP, OpenTelemetry, and a new UI. The red cube on the cover bears the official wordmark: ZABBIX, #d40000, no flourishes.
Riga, 2001: the anti-Nagios with a database
Vladishev did not want a plugin scheduler and a CGI. He wanted items in a database, history, graphs, triggers, and an agent on the host. Server in C, frontend in PHP, data in MySQL (later PostgreSQL, Timescale). The agent talks to the server; the server stores; the frontend reads. Active and passive checks. A proxy for networks the server cannot reach. A Java gateway for JMX. Years later, Agent2 in Go.
Nagios shouted. Zabbix drew graphs. Auto-discovery and auto-registration arrived in 1.8 (December 2009). Host templates. LLD (low-level discovery) for disks, interfaces, containers — objects appear automatically. Those coming from Nagios cfg files felt the shock: here you click. Or talk to the API.
Odd-numbered versions were development branches, even-numbered ones were stable — 1.3 became 1.4. The convention lasted. 2.0 in 2012, 3.0 in 2016, 4.0 in 2018, 5.0 in 2020. The company opened offices in Japan, the US, Brazil, Mexico; in 2025, France. It acquired IZI-IT. Vladishev remains CEO.
6.0 and 7.0: HA, Kubernetes, AGPL
6.0 LTS (8 February 2022) added high-availability clustering to the server, Kubernetes monitoring, and anomaly detection with a hint of ML. 7.0 LTS (4 June 2024) was the political and technical break: the license changed from GPLv2 to AGPLv3. Anyone delivering Zabbix as SaaS needs to open the code or buy a license. Browser synthetic monitoring, a better API, and load-balanced proxies arrived. 7.4 (30 June 2025) is the “fast” stable branch; security support lasts until 31 December 2026. 7.0 LTS runs through June 2029. 6.0 LTS still receives patches — 6.0.48 on 28 July 2026.
What Zabbix is, in one sentence
A metrics database with triggers. Item (the metric), host (the target), template (the blueprint), trigger (the calculation that becomes a problem), action (what to do), history/trend (the graph). Proxy at the edge. PHP frontend. Agent on Linux, Windows, UNIX. Without Nagios's plugin-per-check model — although scripts can be called. Without NagiosQL, because configuration has lived in SQL since day one.
The Prometheus covered on this blog — Node Exporter and pull — is a cousin: metrics, not checks. Zabbix never abandoned the classic alert (PROBLEM / OK) that Nagios taught. That is why it survived the SRE trend: the NOC still wants a blinking red light.
2026: 7.4.14, 8.0 LTS in the works
On 25 August 2026: 7.4.14 and 7.0.30. Agent2 in Go, official Docker zabbix/zabbix-docker (branches 6.0, 7.0, 7.4, trunk updated in September). 8.0.0beta2 was released on 9 July 2026. What Vladishev showed at Summit 2025 / the Japan conference: Complex Event Processing (filtering, normalizing, suppressing, closing old events), APM and OpenTelemetry, cloud-native scaling (separate UI, API, server, and history DB), AI, a global marketplace for partner solutions. The new slogan: “Your business works — you know it.” Observability, not just ping.
Packages on Ubuntu/Debian come from Zabbix's own repository — the distro almost always lags behind. The frontend is PHP; FPM 8.5 on Ubuntu 26.04 does the job.
Nagios, Zabbix, and what each became
Nagios: the check and the pager. Zabbix: the item and the graph. Prometheus: the scrape and Grafana. All three coexist. Latvian company, AGPL code, Riga in the courtyard. The red cube is neither a fox nor a dovecote — it is the name, in uppercase, as always.
Wrap-up
A Latvian, a 2001 GPL release, and the determination to put metrics in a database. 7.4.14, 7.0 LTS, 8.0 in beta. AGPLv3 since 7.0. The courtyard on the cover is Riga: brick, Art Nouveau, harbor. Tux on the cobblestones. ZABBIX on the cube.
The ancestor of alerting: Nagios. The cfg editor: NagiosQL. Modern pull: Prometheus and Node Exporter.