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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?
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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.
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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.
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It appears I am not yet interested.
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I'll ignore your blatant misuse of the phrase 'begging the question', but answer your specific question: JPEG was probably chosen because not all browsers support PNG -- especially true of older versions of IE -- but, they do all support JPEG.
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Slashdot is for anything the Slashdot staff feel like approving.
It's not for satisfying anonymous cowards.
Advanced users are users too!
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.
Unfortunately, that usage of "begs the question" has become prevalent enough that it probably can no longer be described as "blatently misuse".
d ern_usage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begs_the_question#Mo
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!
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We're talking about a Open/Free Unix-based management system. They're probably worried about supporting Mosaic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You laugh but I had a job where ping was their "solution". First day of "training" they show me this batch file that I needed to run in the morning. The batch went and pinged everything, if it ran successfully then everything was up and life was good.
Yeah, that was an interesting gig.
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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.
Actually, Netscape Navigator didn't have PNG support until version 4.04. And PNG support in IE browsers 4.0-6.0 has been abysmal. IE 4 will crash on any PNG with metadata, and IE 5-7 have problems with proper gamma support. And IE 4-6 doesn't support PNG transparency, at least not in anyway that's useful.
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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.
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I am as big a PostgreSQL bigot as you are likely to find, but I don't see the problem with using MySQL for storing monitoring data. I mean seriously, why should I care if the application stores the fact that my servers still respond to pings in a transaction safe manner? Nagios, which I currently use, stores this information in flat text files.
IE6 supports PNG transparency through the AlphaImageLoader ActiveX control, but my experience has been that it does not load reliably, so yes, you're quite right. I just wanted to reply and say this stuff before someone else showed up and said "What about AlphaImageLoader?" For me, it would work on something like 50% of page loads.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not to mention with the advent of the Firehose I get to be a part of the
selection process now as well.
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Yeah, I'm currently running a Zabbix server monitoring about 90 machines. That's running just fine on MySQL 5.0.27 GA, at well over 500 queries a second and not a single slow page load with a webserver running on the same box. It's only got a gig of RAM, too. Till I see PostgreSQL perform at the same level, we'll talk. Hell, PostgreSQL runs Zabbix about 9 times slower according to Zabbix's internal benchmarks.
Could not open
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.....
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That doesn't matter. If he wanted the 12 people still using IE4 to see his site, he could have used GIF.
Attention everyone: Lossy image compression, such as JPG, should NEVER EVER EVER be used for things with solid colors or high contrasts (especially text)! Use PNG, GIF, BMP, or any other losslessly/un-compressed format. JPG is only for "natural" images such as photographs!
Compressing text with lossy image compression is a sin almost as bad as butchering "beg the question." BOTH of these atrocities make the baby Jesus cry.
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The link description is outdated. I installed the 1.1.1 appliance. It works, its pretty but it doesn't do everything we want.
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
Because if my shop doesnt already use MySQL, then its adding an entire new DBMS just to support one app. That's expensive.
Most shops settle on one 'utility' db for stuff like this so that they can amortize their maintenance costs across everything they use it for. Think of all the highly specialized functions surrounding a DB server that you've got to do: backup, patch, monitor, upgrade periodically, and generally just maintain it (ie, make sure its tuned right for memory, not running out of disk, has the right firewall ports opened, etc etc).
So if I've already got PostgreSQL or MSSQL or whatever, having to add an entire DBMS just to host one app whose developers couldnt be bothered to use a DAL (Data Abstraction Layer) is irritating, and is often a dealbreaker. It makes using that app much more expensive (in terms of ancillary maintenance costs) than it would have to be if it was just backed by ODBC/JDBC/Pear/whatever, and you could plugin whatever DB you wanted.
Systems administrators like data access layers, and DBAs like forcing everyone to use whatever database they like best. I personally hate data access layers. What's the point of having a "real" database like Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MSSQL if you are going to pretend that it is no more capable than MySQL 3.23.
Like I said before, I don't like MySQL, but it certainly is easy to care for. For applications like Zenoss where all you need is some basic storage there is very little reason not to simply bundle MySQL with the install. Developers are starting to use MySQL for some of the same tasks that they used to use dbm for not too long ago. Many users probably won't even bother to back the database up on a regular basis. Like I said before, whether or not a certain machine responded to a ping is hardly the sort of data I need to retain for the long term. MySQL is certainly an acceptable tool for the job.
Of course, that being the case a data access layer that only supports MySQL's features is hardly a difficult thing to write, and sometimes having the data in your database of choice is worth a little extra configuration.
I think they've just tuned zabbix for mysql. I use zabbix+mysql and I use postres for other projects. In my testing, well tuned postgres is pretty scalable.. This link shows another perspective:
s ql-performance.html
http://blog.page2rss.com/2007/01/postgresql-vs-my
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No, you're right. I'm familiar with AlphaImageLoader, and I also know that it's very broken. However, it also requires special coding considerations to be taken by the Web developer, unlike using a normal PNG with transparency, which requires nothing special.
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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
Almost, but not quite. JPEG is also good for unnatural images that have lots of very small changes in color. Gradient backgrounds are one that spring to mind.
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