In Zabbix, there are filters everywhere, both in configuration and display contexts: in list of hosts, templates, “Latest data”, Problems view etc. These filters have been extended more and more during the last releases, and they already look quite “overloaded” on one hand, and on the other hand they are still missing quite a lot of useful functionalities which almost all bigger customers (and not only those) do strongly wish:

• Filtering by regular expressions, i.e. in host name, …
• IP filtering by CIDR notation in interface addresses
• Negating and concatenating filters (“all hosts being part of hostgroup “A” whose host name matches regular expression ‘^db[0-9]”’ and which are assigned to this and that template” or “all hosts being part of hostgroup “B” who do not have tag “C” assigned", for example)
• Filter by responsible person, by amount of problems
• A lot more…

Additionally, there is a strong need to make the UI pages more flexible: currently, applied filters are saved in cookies, which causes a lot of undesired situations, such as a page showing up a different search result, host data, etc. than expected. This has been seen as very annoying by a lot of users.

Another annoying thing is, that for example in the problems-widget on a dashbboard one can exclude one or more hostgroups. But this seems not possible on the problems view, even if the filters else look very similar.

A good and forward-looking solution would be an approach such as Atlassian Jira’s: in all pages where filters may be needed, the content is totally customizable by using a generic query language. Same has been seen at some monitoring solutions (Nagios based, see screenshot attached).

A query language like that, combined with a graphical "filter builder" to help figuring out which possibilities there are to filter the current view, and probably even still some check boxes like those existing currently (“show acknowledged” and such) which change the query language parameters inline by pressing them, would make the whole Zabbix user interface much more flexible and better to use in large environments. Those same filters could be used inside of dashboard widgets, in the graph widget, in future maybe even in custom graphs (making them dynamic), in maps (to show, i.e. not just "one host group of hosts" but those exactly matching such a filter) and much more.

Beside of the above described, I believe it would make sense to hand over the queries in URL parameters. This way, a proper “navigating back” would be possible, permalinks with queries included could be handed over to coworkers etc. Additionally such queries could be saved as “saved searches”, been combined with user permissions (like dashboards etc.) and this way be visible and quickly accessible for other users.

As I have seen in other monitoring solutions, one possible way to implement could be to include the actual type of information (problems, latest data, …) to see in the query. This way, one query would clearly tell the UI which page to render. This would allow also custom frontend modules to integrate into such a filtering sub system.