Proxmox integrates Zabbix: official monitoring for your virtualized infrastructure

On June 25, 2026, Proxmox took a step the sysadmin community had been asking for years: welcoming Zabbix as an official Solution Provider. Monitoring Proxmox VE environments no longer depends on homemade scripts and becomes a native, API-based integration backed by both companies. At everyWAN we've been monitoring our own Proxmox + Ceph infrastructure with Zabbix for a while, so let's get practical: what was announced, how it works under the hood, how to set it up step by step, and what we've learned running it in production.

Until now, monitoring Proxmox VE with Zabbix worked, but through community templates, external scripts and manual tweaks that everyone maintained on their own. With the wave of companies leaving VMware after the Broadcom acquisition, that model fell short. Official backing changes the rules: guaranteed compatibility, ongoing maintenance and a single source of truth.

What exactly did Proxmox announce

Proxmox Server Solutions announced that Zabbix LLC joins its partner ecosystem as an official Solution Provider. It's not a third-party plugin or an unsupported template: it's an integration backed by both companies, which means better compatibility, support and long-term continuity. With a global network of over 3,000 integration partners and tens of thousands of corporate customers, Proxmox strengthens its enterprise offering in the observability space too.

The integration is built on Zabbix 7.4 (supported since version 7.0, with templates even for 6.0–6.4) and delivers full monitoring and observability for organizations running mission-critical workloads on Proxmox Virtual Environment. In the words of Marina Generalova, Integrations Delivery Manager at Zabbix:

"We're glad to offer Proxmox users deeper visibility into their virtualized environments."

What you can monitor (real coverage)

The official template, called "Proxmox VE by HTTP", covers the entire virtualization stack from a single console and without installing an agent inside each virtual machine. These are the four main blocks:

How it works under the hood

The beauty is that it's agentless. Zabbix uses its built-in HTTP agent to query the Proxmox VE REST API (the /api2/json/… endpoints) authenticating with a read-only API token over HTTPS on port 8006. There's no need to touch each VM or install anything inside the guests.

The second key piece is Low-Level Discovery (LLD): Zabbix discovers nodes, VMs, containers, storage, disks, tasks and users on its own, and creates items and triggers automatically. Add a new VM and, without touching anything, it starts being monitored.

Step-by-step setup

Setting it up takes minutes. This is the real flow with the official template:

For step 2, create the read-only user and token from a Proxmox node shell using the built-in PVEAuditor role:

Copy the resulting Token ID and secret into the host macros in Zabbix:

From there, auto-discovery does the rest: on the first pass you'll see your nodes, VMs, containers and storage appear with data.

The template ships 6 discovery (LLD) rules that populate on their own:

What you can alert on (real examples)

The template ships with ready-made triggers. Here are some alerts it fires out of the box:

Zabbix 7.4: why it fits Proxmox so well

Zabbix 7.4 brings new features that feel tailor-made for a Proxmox environment:

Our experience: how we monitor Proxmox + Ceph at everyWAN

At everyWAN we don't speak from hearsay. We run Proxmox VE with Ceph storage across several datacenters, and we monitor it in production with Zabbix (metrics and alerts) and Grafana (dashboards). This is what we watch every minute:

And a field lesson that reinforces the value of this official integration: to read Ceph status, the Proxmox API uses the manager's RESTful module on port 8003, which needs a self-signed certificate (ceph restful create-self-signed-cert) and only listens on the active manager. After a Ceph upgrade we lost our metrics overnight precisely there, and we moved to a native, failover-proof push method. The lesson: an official, supported integration is exactly what prevents these surprises. If network monitoring is your thing, we also published our SmokePing Docker image.

Proxmox + Zabbix vs VMware + Aria

For anyone coming from VMware, the comparison is direct. The proprietary stack (vSphere + Aria Operations, formerly vRealize) offers powerful observability, but with a licensing cost that has skyrocketed after the Broadcom acquisition. The open stack Proxmox VE + Zabbix covers the same ground —cluster, nodes, VMs, storage, alerts— with no licensing cost and with official support. We break it down with numbers in our Proxmox vs VMware comparison and in the real case of migrating 500+ VMs.

Frequently asked questions

Conclusion

The official Proxmox + Zabbix integration cements Proxmox as a serious enterprise alternative to VMware, now in observability too. Native, agentless, API-based monitoring, with auto-discovery, ready-to-use alerts and official backing from both companies. For anyone already using or evaluating Proxmox, it's one more reason to take the leap —and a direct way to improve visibility, availability and operational continuity across the whole infrastructure.