7 Unit symbols

Overview

Working with large values such as "86400", "104857600", or "1000000" can be challenging and can lead to errors. Therefore, Zabbix supports unit symbols (suffixes) that function as value multipliers.

The use of suffixes can simplify, for example, the configuration of trigger expressions, making them easier to understand and maintain.

Trigger expressions without suffixes:

last(/host/system.uptime)<86400
       avg(/host/system.cpu.load,600s)<10
       last(/host/vm.memory.size[available])<20971520

Trigger expressions with suffixes:

last(/host/system.uptime)<1d
       avg(/host/system.cpu.load,10m)<10
       last(/host/vm.memory.size[available])<20M

Suffixes can also simplify the configuration of other entities - item keys, widgets, etc. To see if a configuration field supports suffixes, always see the relevant page for the entity being configured.

Time suffixes

Zabbix supports the following time suffixes:

s - seconds (when used, works the same as the raw value)
m - minutes
h - hours
d - days
w - weeks
M - months (trend functions only)
y - years (trend functions only)

Time suffixes support only integer numbers. For example, "1h" is supported, but "1,5h" or "1.5h" is not; use "90m" instead.

Memory size suffixes

Zabbix supports the following memory size suffixes:

K - kilobyte
M - megabyte
G - gigabyte
T - terabyte

Other uses

Unit symbols are also used for a human-readable representation of data in Zabbix frontend.

Zabbix server and frontend support the following unit symbols (suffixes):

K - kilo
M - mega
G - giga
T - tera
P - peta (frontend only)
E - exa (frontend only)
Z - zetta (frontend only)
Y - yotta (frontend only)

When configuring items, such units as B, Bps, s, uptime, and unixtime are supported for human-readable conversion of received values.

When displaying item values in bytes (B) or bytes per second (Bps), a base 2 conversion is applied (1K = 1024B); otherwise, a base 10 conversion is applied (1K = 1000).

Preventing unit conversion

By default, specifying a unit for an item results in a multiplier prefix being added - for example, an incoming value '2048' with unit 'B' would be displayed as '2KB' by the frontend (for more details, see Units in item configuration).

To prevent a unit from conversion, use the ! prefix, for example, !B. To better understand how the conversion works with and without the exclamation mark, see the following examples of values and units:

1024 !B → 1024 B
       1024 B → 1 KB
       61 !s → 61 s
       61 s → 1m 1s
       0 !uptime → 0 uptime
       0 uptime → 00:00:00
       0 !! → 0 !
       0 ! → 0

Before Zabbix 4.0, there was a hardcoded unit stoplist consisting of ms, rpm, RPM, %. This stoplist has been deprecated, thus the correct way to prevent converting such units is !ms, !rpm, !RPM, !%.

Documentation