🌐 Zabbix Map Animation

Animated data-flow links for native Zabbix network maps

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Animates data flow on links in the native Zabbix Monitoring → Maps page — moving "packet" dashes, multiple staggered packets, or a pulsing glow — fully configurable from a GUI settings page inside Zabbix itself. No core files are modified; this is a standard Zabbix frontend module.

Tested on Zabbix 7.4, Apache + PHP-FPM, RHEL/CentOS Stream with SELinux enforcing.

✨ Features

🎞️ 3 animation styles	Single packet, multiple staggered packets, or pulsing fade
⚙️ Fully configurable	Speed, direction, stroke widths, dash patterns, glow — all from the GUI
🎨 Color-aware	Skip animating red "down/critical" links automatically
🖱️ Zero file editing	Configure everything from Monitoring → Map Animation Settings
🧩 Native integration	Standard Zabbix module — survives upgrades, no core file changes

📸 Screenshots

Requirements

• Zabbix 7.4 frontend (PHP-based, MVC module system).
• Write access for the web server user to one file inside the module (assets/config.json) - see Installation step 4.
• If running under SELinux (RHEL/CentOS/Stream/Alma/Rocky), enforcing mode is supported, but requires one extra chcon/semanage step - included below. This was the single biggest source of friction during testing, so don't skip it.

Installation

1. Find your actual Zabbix frontend root. This is not always /usr/share/zabbix/ directly - on many installs it's /usr/share/zabbix/ui/. Confirm with:

find / -maxdepth 5 -iname "index.php" 2>/dev/null | grep -i zabbix

Whatever directory that index.php sits in is your real root. All paths below assume /usr/share/zabbix/ui/ - adjust if yours differs.

2. Clone (or download + extract) this repo directly on the Zabbix server, into the frontend's modules/ directory - do not extract on Windows and copy files over individually, several subtle file-transfer issues (dropped subfolders, broken brace expansion, wrong encoding) can silently corrupt the module structure that way.

cd /usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/
git clone https://github.com/venkateshr9/zabbix-map-animation.git zabbix_map_animation

3. Set correct ownership and SELinux context for the whole module:

chown -R apache:apache /usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/zabbix_map_animation
restorecon -Rv /usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/zabbix_map_animation

(replace apache with whatever user your PHP-FPM pool actually runs as - check with grep "^user" /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf)

4. Make the settings file writable - both at the Linux permission level and, separately, at the SELinux level (regular file permissions alone are not sufficient under SELinux enforcing mode):

chmod 664 /usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/zabbix_map_animation/assets/config.json

chcon -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t /usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/zabbix_map_animation/assets/config.json
semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t \
  "/usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/zabbix_map_animation/assets/config.json"
restorecon -v /usr/share/zabbix/ui/modules/zabbix_map_animation/assets/config.json

If semanage isn't installed: yum install -y policycoreutils-python-utils then re-run the two lines above. The semanage fcontext -a step is what makes the writable context survive future restorecon calls - without it, a later restorecon -R will silently revert the file back to read-only.

5. Register the module in Zabbix: Administration -> General -> Modules -> Scan directory, then click "Disabled" next to Network Map Link Animation to enable it.

6. Verify both pieces work:

• Open Monitoring -> Map Animation Settings - the form should load with default values and save without error.
• Open Monitoring -> Maps, view any map - links should animate.

Configuration

All animation behavior is controlled from Monitoring -> Map Animation Settings once installed - no need to edit config.json by hand. Every field on that page has inline help text explaining what it does.

File structure

zabbix_map_animation/
  manifest.json                          module metadata + registered actions
  Module.php                              menu registration + page-injection hook
  actions/
    SettingsView.php                      settings page controller (reads/writes config.json)
  views/
    mapanimation.settings.view.php        settings page form (native Zabbix UI components)
  assets/
    config.json                           current saved settings (web server needs write access)
    css/map-animation.css                 animation keyframes
    js/map-animation.js                   animation logic, reads config.json at runtime

How it works

Module.php hooks Zabbix's onTerminate() event, which fires on every request right before the page is sent to the browser. It checks if the current page is the native map view (map.view) and, if so, injects a <link>/<script> tag pointing at this module's own CSS/JS - the same effect as pasting that code into the page manually, but done cleanly through Zabbix's supported extension mechanism instead of editing core files (so it survives Zabbix upgrades).

Troubleshooting

Module doesn't appear after Scan directory: check manifest.json is valid JSON (python3 -m json.tool manifest.json) and every .php file has no syntax errors (php -l <file>).

Settings page is blank-styled / pinned far left: the view isn't using Zabbix's native page classes - already fixed in this version, but if you modify mapanimation.settings.view.php, keep using CHtmlPage/CForm/ CFormList rather than raw HTML.

Settings page 500s: check /var/log/php-fpm/error.log (path may differ - find yours with grep -i error_log /etc/php-fpm.d/*.conf).

Saving settings fails with "Permission denied": this is the SELinux step in Installation #4 - confirm with ls -Z assets/config.json, looking for httpd_sys_rw_content_t.

Map page loads but nothing animates: open browser DevTools console on the Maps page and check for 404s on map-animation.css/.js (confirms files actually transferred) or JS errors (confirms a logic bug rather than a loading problem).

License

MIT - see LICENSE.

Author

Venkatesh Ramalingam GitHub

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Built as an independent, community module — not affiliated with or endorsed by Zabbix SIA. "Zabbix" is a registered trademark of Zabbix SIA.