Zabbix server is not running: the information disp

Question

So all of a sudden, after a week of using it, I get an error message on my zabbix server gui (http://localhost/zabbix/.)

The error says: Zabbix server is not running: the information displayed may not be current.

Any idea why is this happening ll of a sudden and out of the blue? I restarted the machine - which should automatically restore the zabbix server upon startup - but it's still not running.

I also researched for a startup or restart command but true to form with zabbix helpful, clear documentation is non-existent.

EDIT:

Some more info:

MySQL is running normally. I'm able to select, insert into, whatever I want.

Doing /etc/init.d/zabbix-server status results in * zabbix_server is not running

The last entry in zabbix_server.log is Zabbix Server stopped. Zabbix 2.2.9 (revision 52686).

Doing sudo /etc/init.d/zabbix-server start results in * Starting Zabbix server zabbix_server but the status is still not running and the log file doesn't have any new entries.

Answer 1

I was using a special character in my DB password - wrapping the DBPassword option in /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf and doing sudo service zabbix-server restart got me back up and running.

Not Working DBPassword=MyString?

Working DBPassword='MyString?'

Answer 2

In my case it happens when introducing host with templates, graphs,trigger etc, the server falls. The problem was that by default the cache is at 128k and you have to change it.

sudo nano /etc/zabbix/zabbix-server.conf

Uncheck # Sizecache and add 32M for example.

Cachesize=32M

restart service and voila!! server working

service zabbix-server start

Answer 3

I solved this problem on Ubuntu 18.04 by uninstalling Zabbix and reinstalling it again from scratch.

The initial installation didn't work because I had followed old posts/guides/tutorials, even from Zabbix documentation itself, so these might probably be outdated. So, the trick was to find and follow the most updated guide to Zabbix installation from its docs.

Here are the two links I followed for uninstalling and reinstalling Zabbix:

• How to uninstall Zabbix: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-uninstall-Zabbix-server-agent-in-Ubuntu
• How to (properly) install Zabbix: https://www.zabbix.com/download?zabbix=4.0&os_distribution=ubuntu&os_version=18.04_bionic&db=postgresql

When installing Zabbix from the link above, your choosen Zabbix Version, OS Distribution, OS Version or Database may be different from the ones I've selected, but following the instructions on this page will probably be also the right way for you to install your chosen Zabbix configuration without getting errors post installation.

Answer 4

Looks like the problem was that I created a Database monitoring Item programmatically and it triggered a bug that caused the server to shutdown.

Once I deleted the item the server came back up, and creating subsequent Items didn't kill it.

The deadly Item had a value_type of Numeric unsigned, -1 programmatically, while the newly created Items have a value_type of float, which is 0 programmatically.

The whole thing has a voodoo element to it but it did solve my problem.

Answer 5

The zabbix-server daemon doesn't seem to like passwords with special characters in them. Unsure whether quotes would work in the configuration I just removed special characters from the database password, updated the configuration files and restarted the daemon.

Configuration parsing errors don't show up in logs for some reason.

Answer 6

My problem was caused by having external ip in $ZBX_SERVER setting.

I changed it to localhost instead so that ip was resolved internally,

$sudo nano /etc/zabbix/web/zabbix.conf.php

Changed

$ZBX_SERVER = 'external ip was written here';

to

$ZBX_SERVER = 'localhost';

then

$sudo service zabbix-server restart

Zabbix 3.4 on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS