Zabbix Authentication with Active Directory
When the number of Zabbix users starts growing, creating users and managing passwords directly in Zabbix can become a bit annoying.
And if we already have Active Directory in our environment, why manage the same usernames and passwords in two different places? 😄
We can connect Zabbix to Active Directory and let users log in with their existing domain username and password.
In this video, I go through this setup step by step.
What Are We Going to Do?
The scenario is pretty simple.
We connect Zabbix to Active Directory using LDAP and configure Zabbix to authenticate users against AD.
The authentication flow looks something like this:
User → Zabbix → LDAP → Active Directory
So when a user tries to log in to Zabbix, their credentials are checked against Active Directory instead of using a separate password managed only inside Zabbix.
Why Use Active Directory?
The biggest advantage is simpler user management.
For example, if a user changes their password in Active Directory, we don't need to change anything in Zabbix.
It also means we don't have to manage another set of passwords just for our monitoring system.
One account, one password, fewer headaches. That's always a good thing! 😄
How Does the LDAP Connection Work?
To connect Zabbix to Active Directory, we need to configure the LDAP authentication settings.
This includes things like:
LDAP Server, Port, Base DN, Bind DN, and Search Attribute
Some of these options, especially Base DN and Search Attribute, can be a little confusing the first time you work with LDAP.
For example, in Active Directory we can use sAMAccountName as the Search Attribute, allowing users to log in with their normal domain username.
After configuring everything, we can test the LDAP connection directly from Zabbix before actually using it.
And yes, testing it first is a pretty good idea. Locking yourself out of Zabbix isn't the best way to finish an authentication tutorial! 😄
What About JIT Provisioning?
For now, we are not using JIT User Provisioning.
The goal of this video is simply to understand how LDAP authentication works and how we can connect Zabbix to Active Directory.
JIT gives us more options for automatically provisioning and managing users, but we'll leave that for another part.
First, let's get the basic LDAP authentication working properly. Then we can make things more interesting.
In this video, I configure the LDAP connection step by step, test the connection, and finally log in to Zabbix using an Active Directory user account.
Zabbix + Active Directory = one less password to remember. I'll take that! 😄
