Are you looking for a solution to “zabbix cannot connect to the database” error ? Here’s how we fix it.

Zabbix is a monitoring software tool. When using zabbix we may encounter many errors like zabbix cannot connect to the database. This may occur due to incorrect database details.

At Bobcares, we often get requests from our customers to fix ‘zabbix cannot connect to the database’ as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, we’ll see the reasons and how our Support Engineers fix this error.

Causes for ‘Zabbix cannot connect to the database’ Error

At Bobcares, where we have more than a decade of expertise in managing servers, we see many customers face problems while managing Zabbix.

Now, let’s see the major reasons for this Zabbix error to occur and we’ll also see how our Support Engineers fix this zabbix database cannot connect error.

Incorrect Database details

Recently one of our customers approached us with the same zabbix problem. He said he was getting an error in his zabbix dashboard like the one shown below in the screenshot.

When we checked in detail, our Support Engineers found that there is mismatch in the details given in database with those in zabbix_server configuration file.

We found that the DBName given in database was not the same as the one given in zabbix configuration file. So, we changed it to the right one. Finally, this fixed the error.

We also Checked and confirmed whether all other values entered were right.

Incorrect DBsocket

We got another request from some other customer. However, the error was similar. Here is the error message our customer was receiving.

[ZXXX] connection to database 'Databasename' failed: [2002] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql'

We checked and found that the socket given in mysql configuration file is different from the one specified in the configuration file for zabbix. In mysql configuration DBSocket value was  /var/run/mysql/mysql.sock and in zabbix_server configuration it was  DBSocket=/var/run/mysql. So, we made the following corrections in zabbix configuration file:

XXXX:/usr/share/zabbix # cat /etc/zabbix/zabbix-server.conf
LogFile=/var/log/zabbix/zabbix-server.log
PidFile=/var/run/zabbix/zabbix-server.pid
DBName=*****
DBUser=*****
DBPassword=*************
DBSocket=/var/run/mysql/mysql.sock

And this fixed the problem.

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Conclusion

In short, ‘Zabbix cannot connect to the database’ error may occur due to some reasons like wrong database details or when there is any mismatch in configuration file values, etc. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers fix this error.