TimescaleDB add to existing PostgreSQL, Zabbix 7.0 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

  • 2025-03-19
  • Tobias

This is how I added TimescaleDB to my PostgreSQL-server and enabled it on my existing Zabbix database. I found alot of helpful artikels and reference material at initMAX ( https://www.initmax.com/ ), which made everything easier.

In short this is my setup. Three servers running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, one for Zabbix server, another for Zabbix frontend and lastly a PostgreSQL(v16) server.

We will be working almost exclusively on the Postgres server and the other two just to stop and start the services when we enable TimescaleDB.

Open a terminal or connect via SSH to your PostgreSQL server. For convenience you could run “sudo su -” or prefix all commands with “sudo“.

Make temporary directory where we can download source code and store other files.

mkdir /tmp/zabbix-db-migration/ && cd $_

Check exact version of Zabbix server and download that source code. My Zabbix server version is 7.0.10.

wget https://cdn.zabbix.com/zabbix/sources/stable/7.0/zabbix-7.0.10.tar.gz

tar -zxvf zabbix-7.0.10.tar.gz

Add TimescaleDB repo.

echo "deb https://packagecloud.io/timescale/timescaledb/ubuntu/ $(lsb_release -c -s) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/timescaledb.list

wget --quiet -O - https://packagecloud.io/timescale/timescaledb/gpgkey | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/timescaledb.gpg

Install TimeScaleDB. Check your PostgreSQL version first, mine is 16. Two different alternatives:
Alt. 1 – install latest release, change config ( nano /etc/zabbix/zabbix_server.conf ) look for ( AllowUnsupportedDBVersions=1 ).
Alt. 2 – install latest supported TimeScaleDB (2.18), no need to change Zabbix config.

apt update
(Alt.1)
apt install timescaledb-2-postgresql-16 timescaledb-2-loader-postgresql-16 postgresql-client-16 -y
(Alt.2)
apt install timescaledb-2-postgresql-16='2.18.0*' timescaledb-2-loader-postgresql-16='2.18.0*' postgresql-client-16

Run the tuning utility, if you like you can pass arguments like max connections. Also possible to edit the configuration file afterwards for further tuning. When running the utility it’s recommended to answer Yes on all questions.

timescaledb-tune --max-conns=125

Now we need to stop the Zabbix server. Go to that machine and run “systemctl stop zabbix-server“.

Restart the service PostgreSQL.

systemctl restart postgresql

Activate TimescaleDB for the Zabbix database.

echo "CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS timescaledb CASCADE;" | sudo -u postgres psql --dbname=zabbix

Now we need to load data from the extracted source code, the schema for TimescaleDB. Migration might take a while depending on the amount of data.

sudo -u postgres psql --host=127.0.0.1 --dbname=zabbix --username=zabbix -f /tmp/zabbix-db-migration/zabbix-7.0.10/database/postgresql/timescaledb/schema.sql

Now we can start the Zabbix server again. Go to that machine and run “systemctl start zabbix-server“.

All done. Remove the tmp files to clean up afterwards.

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