Slashdot Mirror
Best OSS Systems Mgmt App You Never Heard Of
FLOSSisnot4Teeth writes "You probably are familiar with Nagios and Webmin as two of the most widely deployed open source systems management applications. However, this month's SourceForge.net Project of the Month is probably a newcomer to open source systems and network administrators. Zenoss Core is a systems monitoring platform, released under GPL and over the last year it's become one of the most popular SF.net projects. Unlike most of these new "commercially backed" open source projects, Zenoss Core is the only version, their corporate sponsor doesn't offer a "pro version". Also their developers have been committing code back to other projects like RRDTool and Twisted. I have been playing around with Zenoss for about six months and have been totally impressed. Would be curious to see what other Slashdot readers think." SourceForge.net and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
This seems a bit reminiscent of AdventNet's OpManager system. I would like to point out right now, though, that OpManager is about 700$ for a decent license that even compares to the kind of coverage you get from Zenoss. I wouldn't compare this app to Webmin so much; webmin controls only local system programs and some minimal enterprise software. This dives into the devices end of things as well, providing a decent number of MIBs. I'm very impressed by how the management console includes inventory on devices. Documentation seems decent, but then again I've been working with enterprise networking and systems management for several years. Even at that, this tool isn't demeaning to those who have prior experience. All and all a great OSS project and I look forward to seeing it continue to improve with time.
There is no documentation listed on the Source forge site. Does it monitor Windows machines without having to install extra software on the Windows Servers and Desktops? Does it monitor routers and switches? Is there any documentation?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss says:
Project of the month for : February 2007
http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2007-03.php says:
Project of the Month: March 2007 - Zenoss Core
Looks like a newcomer alright...
To: FLOSSisnot4Teeth
You might be interested in this Slashdot article.
Yeah, I know it's way OT, but I had read the linked article just before I saw the submitter's name on the current story.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Come on, too easy.
It may very well be a good package, but until such time they use PNG for their screenshots, going through the tour involves squinting hard. Unfortunately no schooners appear, begging the question why JPEG was used to start with.
/. is not to be used for whoring projects you work on, blogs you get paid for, or anything else that enriches the poster. If it's really that important, let someone who isn't biased report it.
Zenoss
Jan 26, 2007
I may have finally found the perfect monitor solution for my network: Zenoss. I have been using Nagios + Cacti + Smokeping for quite a while now. It works, but it's not integrated, and for many services, I'm running 2-3 checks. Running those every 5-10 minutes generates a tremendous amount of traffic (during the last 2 weeks, the monitor station has caused 20% of all traffic crossing the primary firewall!). The closest all-in-one I'd found previously was OpenNMS, which is so difficult to really understand and manage well, and so didn't fit my needs. I'd given some thought to rolling my own in Ruby, but just don't have the time for such an undertaking.
So while browsing the rPath/rBuilder site this morning, I discovered Zenoss. It's Zope-based, which I find a bit interesting. But from what I've seen in the 30 minutes I've had it running, the developers are right on with what I've been looking for. It has auto-discovery support, placing everything into a "/Discovered" group if it can't pick the right group on its own (the firewall was placed into the "/Network/Routers" group since it was part of the discovery chain). But it is smart enough to correlate different IPs to a single device, which OpenNMS can't do. It also supports Nagios plugins (though only via ssh and not nrpe), so I can leverage that investment while I evaluate the Zenoss way of checking.
There's also a built-in syslog catcher, so it can correlate log events to devices, which could be another huge time saver. And it has asset/inventory management so I don't need to keep that data separately either. What can't this puppy do?!
You can install from source or RPM, and there's a vmware image available too. It requires Python 2.3.5+ and MySQL 5.0.22+. Since I wanted to run on my Debian Sarge monitor station (which already has access to all the devices to manage), I had to upgrade the DB. Easy enough with the backports. The only trick I ran into there is that the install process requires port 8100 be available. You can change after install, but I couldn't find a way to change prior. The installer doesn't notice if the port is already in use, it just silently fails, and so when starting the Zope DB setup, it gets in a loop of printing "." (dots). Finally realized I had to shut down a Mongrel-run Rails app to get it going, and it worked perfectly. (Bug #933 has been filed.)
Stay tuned for more, as I will be playing with this ALOT over the next few weeks!
You have searched for packages that names contain zenoss in all suites, all sections, and all architectures.
Can't find that package.
----
It appears I am not yet interested.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Interesting how the submitter writes the post suggesting as if they're a user....
"I've been playing around with it for six months and have been totally impressed!"
Easy to be impressed by your own products, isn't it?
I can't understand why this isn't tagged dupe already... I seem to remember ZenOSS on /. a month or so ago... followed by an article on OpenNMS as well.
3 3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/00322
I think Vista has broken most commercial network mgmnt offerings... nothing else can explain these dupes!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
This product costs $10K to have support for 50 machines. That's $200/device. I thought that OSS was supposed to be cheaper?
I don't respond to AC's.
I've looked over someone's shoulder at the latter - it seems pretty good, it runs on SNMP - I tinkered with NAGIOS five years ago and found it good, but a little dangerous if you didn't read the docs before firing it up (back then, anyway, it auto-discovered the local network by strobing everything in sight with Nmap scans)... but I've no experience of any of these in production. I've been asked to build out a new office network, which will be a template for future local offices, and getting the monitoring right is going to be crucial, so any actual experience of production use gratefully received!
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
It also requires MySQL, and isn't compatible with any other SQL back end.
An "enterprise grade" monitoring system hacked onto MySQL? Yeah, right. That's like finding out it's written in PHP.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Did you ever heard of ZABBIX? I believe this is the best Open Source monitoring solution around. It is a mature and flexible piece of software which comes with very impressive feature set.
The company I work for is currently looking into remote monitoring of the data center environmental conditions as well as server status. So far, I've found very few options that will do this, and none seem good enough (one will monitor one of our UPS's but not the other one for example).
We currently have one web-based monitoring tool in place for server status, and I doubt they'll be willing to change to another, especially if it is open source. The last time I mentioned an open-source alternative (change management tool) my boss looked afraid. (sigh).
Does anybody have any suggestions along this line? We will need to be able to monitor the data center environment for temp, moisture, water under the floor, as well as UPS availability. From what all of our upper management is saying, they want to eliminate the need for the night-shift Operations group and migrate us all to helpdesk or deskside support, which would mean a real 9-5 type of job for me and the rest of the red-headed stepchildren of out IT department
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
It's Zenoss version 0.22.3, Zenoss is currently at 1.1.1.
t ory/471">http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/dir ectory/471</a>
<a href="http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/direc
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
I'm using Nagios on a group of core network devices. I have to be super careful not to perform an "up2date" on it (using RH 4.0 EL) because the Nagios packages always overwrite my config files. But Nagios is good, and it's been very useful. It took me a few days of work to get it set up the way I wanted, and it's been a charm ever since.
A few weeks ago someone posted an article on the top ten OSS projects to watch, and Zenoss was one of those projects. I downloaded it to experiment. I had it up and running in about 20 minutes, on Ubuntu. It's far more powerful at its ability to gather data from nodes. And setup is far less manual. Network discovery worked very well. It found devices on our network that we didn't know were out there. It required no integration with other packages. The interface is also more intuitive in some areas, such as viewing event histories. But, it's more challenging to find performance charts the first few times.
I especially liked the automatic snmp walk through the MIBS on each device. This makes it much easier to pull statistics from it, without having to edit text files. The MRTG-style charts are also good. I wish they were more readily configurable. I also wish there were more MIBS in the distribution, but you can find most by carefully searching equipment provider's web sites.
All in all, After running it side by side with my Nagios setup for a couple of weeks, I like it much better. And I'm moving more SNMP agents into my network just because of Zenoss.
i read about this and thought, "hrm, this is worth checking out." when i went to zenoss.org and clicked download, it asked me to fill out a registration form. submitting the form w/o entering anything causes a popup that indicates email is required. disabled javascript, and was able to submit the form and get to the download page (which, btw is here). i wonder who the email for confirming my registration will be sent to.....
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
I've just had a browse, but I can't find an equivalent to the Nagios overview map (the network layout map). Maybe I need to install it to check (not found in screenshots). Without that map it won't work for us..
Insert
Here's a hint:
redundant http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=redu
Hope that helps.
Besides, for real systems management, see Hyperic.
Look, everyone likes to talk about agentless, and they're full of crap. Everything runs an agent - your agent might be SNMP, or whatever Windows happens to run, but you're running an agent whether you admit it or not. Now the question becomes, why run a crappier agent? Why not run an agent that actually gives you data on your applications? Everybody knows that your service/server is "working", but how *well* is it working?
You may want to try Hyperic's VMware management - http://www.hyperic.com/products/managed/vmware-man agement.htm