You now probably want to know how to upgrade your installation and you probably think it is a painful process, but it isn't! Since version 2.2, upgrading Zabbix is so easy that we will cover the process in no more than a page!
Note
If you use binaries (you always should in production) then the first thing you need to do is make sure you have a backup in case things go wrong.
There are two ways of upgrading:
We can just update the patch version.
We can upgrade the major and or minor version in Zabbix.
If you only want to upgrade the minor version (for example, 2.4.0 to 2.4.1) then running an update of your package manager should do the trick, for example, yum update zabbix*. Don't forget to restart services once it's done.
If you want to upgrade Zabbix to a new <major> or <minor> version, for example, 2.2 to 2.4, the follow these steps:
Read the release notes just to be sure that noting special needs to be done.
Then stop the Zabbix services on your server.
Next remove the old binaries.
Install the new Zabbix repo as you would for a new installation.
Install all Zabbix packages again from the new repo.
If you are upgrading from Zabbix 2.0 to 2.2 or from 2.2 to 2.4, everything from here on will be automated. Zabbix will upgrade the database to the new version once you start Zabbix.
If you upgrade from Zabbix pre 2.0, then you will have to add database patches first manually, as automated database patching is only available since version 2.2.
Next, make sure that your services are on when you restart the server.
Zabbix will make a copy of your configuration file, but just to be on the safe side it's probably best to make a copy by yourself before you upgrade. Make sure you change the settings again if you had altered them before you start the server.
Make sure proxies are updated at the same time when you upgrade your server. In case if you can't update at the same time, it's advised to stop the server for some time and then update all the proxies, so that this will not break the collection of data.
You can now start to upgrade your Zabbix agents.