5 Running Agent as root

Starting with version 4.0.15 systemd service file for Zabbix agent in official packages (https://www.zabbix.com/download) was updated to explicitly include directives for User and Group. Both are set to zabbix.

This means that old functionality of configuring which user Zabbix agent runs as via zabbix_agentd.conf file is bypassed and agent will always run as the user specified in the systemd service file.

To override this new behavior create file /etc/systemd/system/zabbix-agent.service.d/override.conf with the following content.

[Service]
       User=root
       Group=root

Reload daemons and restart zabbix-agent service.

systemctl daemon-reload
       systemctl restart zabbix-agent

For agent2 this completely determines the user that it runs as.

For old agent this only re-enables the functionality of configuring user in zabbix_agentd.conf file. Therefore in order to run zabbix agent as root you still have to edit zabbix_agentd.conf and specify User=root as well as AllowRoot=1 options. More on this here: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/4.0/manual/appendix/config/zabbix_agentd.