Storing images in the Zabbix database

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September 9, 2011

The encoding, database and the dog Zabbix provides a network map feature, where images may represent triggers, hosts, host groups etc. They may show current status, problem count and lots of other data. There are some default images that may be used in the maps, and users may also upload their own. This uploading has […]

The encoding, database and the dog

Zabbix provides a network map feature, where images may represent triggers, hosts, host groups etc. They may show current status, problem count and lots of other data. There are some default images that may be used in the maps, and users may also upload their own. This uploading has been a problem in the past.

These images are stored in the database. The problem is, Zabbix supports 5 different databases, and they store binary data in different formats. And that resulted in users having different problems when database encoding was incorrect. Of course, maintaining data in multiple different formats is also not that easy, and updating icon set is harder than it should be.

Re-base the images

Thus the idea is to unify image storing and keep them in base64 for all databases. While that would increase the amount of space images take, it would solve lots of problems and make life easier for Zabbix users. The problem is upgrading.

Users would want to keep their existing images, probably. So upgrade should convert them to base64 (keeping support for old format would be duplicate work, and there would be no way to phase this support out later anyway. Doing this for all supported databases does not seem to be possible at this time with the upgrade process Zabbix currently uses – Zabbix database patches for going to the next major version are in SQL. Involving a separate process outside the database at this time is not considered, and storing images in the filesystem wouldn’t work because of the distributed monitoring.

So the question to the Zabbix community would be – how would you handle this problem?

And, by the way, we are looking for great PHP programmers…

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