I am one of the users. Proxy making a TCP connection to the server every second is very undesirable for me.

I am trying to use Zabbix to monitor a battery-powered Raspberry-pi device in a remote location. The plan was to have a proxy and an agent running on the device, so the proxy would gather data over some time and then connect to the Zabbix server to upload that.  Uploading once every 10 minutes or even once an hour would be enough. Sometimes the connection could be unavailable for days, still ok, as long as the proxy can buffer the data.

Unfortunately currently Zabbix proxy would make a new TCP connection to the server every second, keeping my expensive LTE connection always-on. Not even sending or receiving any useful data!

We also have this problem. We have metered connections over satellite (Inmarsat) to all of our customer sites.

Sending every second a keep alive is really unnecessary and causing unwanted traffic. For LAN connections it does not matter, but over costly satellite links it does.

We need the possibility to adjust this value again. Please add it back.

Best regards

Thomas

It could be better if active proxy would keep persistent connection to Zabbix server and Zabbix server would notify Zabbix proxy only when it actually needs to check task.

wiper: It would need to be optional. There might be thousands of proxies.

It could be better if active proxy would keep persistent connection to Zabbix server and Zabbix server would notify Zabbix proxy only when it actually needs to check task.

Not really better for the scenarios of remote monitoring via unreliable/expensive link, that we are talking about here. Zabbix proxy is great for this purpose as it can cache gathered data for long time and send it only in configured (long) intervals and when the link is available. Making connections every half or every few hours for sending batch of data will be cheaper and more reliable than trying to keep a long-running connection alive.

I have done further tests now and got some statistics via netflow.

We are a shipping company and monitor the IT on container ships over satellite link. The links are very expensive.

Traffic from Server to the proxy is about 20 MB in 24 hours. Traffic from Proxy is about 30 MB in 24 hours. This will be around 1.5GB traffic per month.

We really need to lower the interval in order to go forward with the rollout of Zabbix.

wiper, can you point me in a direction in the source code to increase the second interval?

I have read already trough datasender.c but it is not clear for me where the heartbeat is created.

Maybe it is possible to insert a sleep somewhere as a workaround?

Is there any chance that this feature gets implemented again officially?

Dear ThomasHH!

Can you point me in a direction in the source code to increase the second interval?

Simply change the value here if you don't mind recompiling server and proxy every time you need to change interval. Exposing this setting in config file is not too difficult as well.

include/zbxtasks.h

#define ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY	1

Many thanks,

it took a while to get all the dependencies, but finally i compiled only the proxy with the changes (60 sec) and it works as expected.

I will now look into how to expose it to config file.

i need some hint again to make this value available in the configfile.

i used TaskUpdateFrequency=30 in the config file and made these changes :

i added in proxy.c

int ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY = 60; 

in function zbx_load_config

{"TaskUpdateFrequency",       &ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY,     TYPE_INT,            PARM_OPT,   1,          3600},           

in function zbx_set_defaults

if (NULL == ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY)        ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY = 60; 

However, the values of ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY seems not to be set or recognized properly either from config file or from set_default function, as the interval is now faster than a second

Is there anything else, i need to change

Have you removed (or commented out) this?

#define ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY	1

If code does not compile after this change, fix compilation errors by adding

extern int ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY;

Overall I think you are on the right track.

Great, Many Thanks!!

it is working now also from config file.

Do you see a possibility to get this change in the official version?

best regards

Thomas

Dear ThomasHH, I am happy to hear that you got it working!

As to including this feature into "official version", please take my further words with a grain of salt, because I am not affiliated with Zabbix SIA. As of today, the only way Zabbix accepts code contributions mentioned on their website is via Agent 2 plugins. De jure Zabbix has never admitted that patches are not welcome (i.e. have very little chance of being accepted), but de facto it is what it is. The usual explanation is that "patches are low quality and need rework anyway", but realistically even I as a former Zabbix employee struggle to get tiniest changes through (see ZBX-15677 for example). Getting everyone you know to register in Zabbix JIRA and vote for this ticket can help, but this is not a guarantee.

If you have a working proof-of-concept, I would still encourage you to attach a patch file to this ticket and/or push it to community maintained patches repo on GitHub. This way other users can discover and use your results.

OK, I see. Then i need to compile the proxy part after each update.

I am not an developer, but i will see if i manage to create an patch file to upload for others.

Anyhow many thanks for your support!

This patch was tested on Zabbix version 6.2.4.

This brings in a new config parameter "TaskUpdateFrequency"

You can use it in the zabbix proxy config file like

TaskUpdateFrequency=60

this will change the heartbeat to every minute instead of every second.

TaskUpdateFrequency.patch

I saw this ticket got created, not sure if it's relevant

ZBXNEXT-7931 - Active proxy heartbeats removed in 6.4 (ignored by server since).

In a similar situation as the poster. Have bandwidth constrained pipes and the non-configurable heartbeat is simply saturating them. I would be more than happy to simply turn off the heartbeat and have the only time my servers check in be when the active check timer goes off. At least that way I have control over the amount of traffic being sent. Even worse is attempting to use TLS, which causes a full TLS session to be built every second. Not sure who possibly thought this was a good idea, but it's a very bad idea in any moderate sized network.

It appears that Zabbix agent 3.0 supports the argument, but that's very old. I'd love to use zabbix but I do not want to be in the game of custom patching my environment for any release. Here's to hoping someone on the zabbix team decides to take it seriously. Until then I guess it's back to nagios for me.

Hi:

   anyone know if the problem is resolved at 6.4/7.0? I am currently use 6.0 with passive proxy. I need to recompile every time to reduce 90% useless network traffic.

Don't know, but for our case, we setup a limit via firewall - not ideal, but so far works reasonably good.

ip6tables -t filter -A output_tun_xyz -p tcp --dport 10051 --tcp-flags SYN,ACK,FIN,RST SYN -m limit --limit 5/hour -j ACCEPT
ip6tables -t filter -A output_tun_xyz -p tcp --dport 10051 --tcp-flags SYN,ACK,FIN,RST SYN -j DROP

New GO zabbix agent should have persistent storage I think, so we shouldn't need satelite proxies anymore, but it would be useful in cases where we do.

First of all, this not being configurable - is there for a reason. We have things that depend on this being sent frequently:

• remote command execution with active proxy
• the Execute now functionality
• determine Agent interface status

The impact on making this configurable should definitely be measured first.

There is too much traffic generated and not used by the server nor the proxy.

I shall be able to configure delay of the remote execution with active proxies and determine Agent interface status.

Is there any possibility in Proxy or Server version 6.4 (or 7.0) to change ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY without recompiling server/proxy?

Eventually, do you know, how to do that in the Docker containers?

Quoting from here: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/appendix/protocols/server_proxy#data-request-1

Note that active proxy will still poll Zabbix server every second for remote command tasks (with an empty proxy data request).

So, no, currently it is not configurable. I think it won't hurt if we allow this parameter to be configured with not too big higher limit:

### Option: TaskUpdateFrequency
#       How often proxy requests/sends task information from/to Zabbix Server in seconds.
#       For a proxy in the passive mode this parameter will be ignored.
#
# Mandatory: no
# Range: 1-15
# Default:
# TaskUpdateFrequency=1

4 requests a minute shouldn't be an issue?

4 request a minute may definitely be an issue for a system that otherwise could get online only once an hour. There is no need for the proxy to connect to the server more often when it is explicitly configured to upload data only once an hour or so.

Agree with longer periods between contact to the server.

Again it should be configurable, if we like to check new configurations from the server or send keepalive.

There are systems, which never be reconfigurable and are not real-time monitored. And what is real time exactly for different systems. It could be 1 sec, but also 15 minutes or 1 hour.

And I still don't understand, why there is no option to configure ZBX_TASK_UPDATE_FREQUENCY.

IMO, dimir has a point, that changing the update frequency does have follow on consequences and they should be understood. Especially if one subsequently asks for support from zabbix.

OTOH, I believe it would be beneficial, if the interval was freely configurable, with a warning note, that it has impact on responsiveness and checks for (1st thing, second ..). Many people do not in fact use or require any of those things and have a non-negotiable requirement for reduced data usage. There will always be innumerable ways to misconfigure a server.

I think it makes sense to allow users to set the option to the value they need, with warning that setting it to too high value might result in delays in task execution and active agent availability in UI.

Yes. Please let uses set the option to the value they need. "1-15" is not enough. please check ZBX-18958.  my environment only use passive proxy. value "60" reduce 90% network traffic. and now I am using value "150"  which is working fine.