zabbix-agent2

Chainguard Container for zabbix-agent2

Minimalist Wolfi-based Zabbix Agent 2 for monitoring hosts and sending metrics to Zabbix Server.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/zabbix-agent2:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

Chainguard's zabbix-agent2 image is comparable to the Zabbix Agent 2 image available on Docker Hub. The Chainguard image runs as a non-root user (zabbix with UID 1997, GID 1995) and is built on Wolfi for a minimal attack surface.

SMART Disk Monitoring

This image includes smartmontools for disk health monitoring but does not ship sudo. The upstream image uses sudo to allow the zabbix user to run smartctl with root privileges, but this increases the attack surface.

To enable SMART disk monitoring, use Linux capabilities instead of sudo:

Docker:

docker run -d \
  --name zabbix-agent2 \
  --cap-add SYS_RAWIO \
  -e ZBX_HOSTNAME="my-host" \
  -e ZBX_SERVER_HOST="zabbix-server" \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/zabbix-agent2:latest

Kubernetes:

securityContext:
  capabilities:
    add: ["SYS_RAWIO"]

This approach is more secure than sudo because it grants only the specific capability needed for smartctl without exposing the full sudo attack surface.

Getting Started

Docker

Run the Zabbix Agent 2 container with basic configuration:

docker run -d \
  --name zabbix-agent2 \
  -e ZBX_HOSTNAME="my-host" \
  -e ZBX_SERVER_HOST="zabbix-server" \
  -e ZBX_SERVER_PORT="10051" \
  -p 10050:10050 \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/zabbix-agent2:latest

With custom configuration file:

docker run -d \
  --name zabbix-agent2 \
  -v /path/to/zabbix_agent2.conf:/etc/zabbix/zabbix_agent2.conf:ro \
  -p 10050:10050 \
  cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/zabbix-agent2:latest \
  --foreground -c /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agent2.conf

Kubernetes with Helm

Deploy using the zabbix-community Helm chart:

helm repo add zabbix-community https://zabbix-community.github.io/helm-zabbix/
helm repo update

helm install zabbix zabbix-community/zabbix -f values.yaml

Create a values.yaml file:

zabbixAgent:
  enabled: true
  runAsDaemonSet: true
  image:
    repository: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/zabbix-agent2
    tag: latest
zabbixServer:
  enabled: false
zabbixProxy:
  enabled: false
zabbixWeb:
  enabled: false
postgresql:
  enabled: false

Documentation and Resources

• Zabbix Agent 2 Documentation
• Zabbix Docker GitHub Repository
• Zabbix Community Helm Chart

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.