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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.
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...
Take a look at http://www.zenoss.com/. They just didn't link it in on the Source Forge site.
Sources for documentation from their main website;
http://zenoss.com/docs/zenwin - Windows documentation, rather brief. Supports 2003/XP apparently.
http://zenoss.com/docs - Main documentation website for Linux / BSD.
Check out: http://zenoss.com/docs
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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Besides the python script to create a WMI monitor, zenoss does have good SNMP support - when you run the Informant http://www.wtcs.org/informant/ SNMP extensions.
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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Don't get me wrong, Nagios rocks and has been a godsend, even back in the netsaint era. Where Zenoss is useful is adding new devices for templates that already exist. In Nagios it's either change the underlying config files, pre-flight, and reload, or use a GUI to do the same.
Our use has transitioned from hand-crafted nagios plugins for bespoke services to more generic checks and longer term capacity planning. Zenoss can do this, and it appears with less operational management, allowing us to focus on performance data and more in-depth Windows monitors (again an internal change from Linux core systems to Windows -- different client base).
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....
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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Incase your wondering he said support, not purchase.
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.
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.
If you don't already have all of the monitoring hardware in place, check out the NetBotz (now owned by APC) suite of monitoring products. You buy one rack-mount system, and can tie any number of sensor "pods" (or even third-party sensors via customizable input contacts), and all sensors report back to the main unit for logging and alerting. It can also forward the SNMP traps onto an existing network monitoring system if you have one.
I don't believe they'll monitor UPS equipment however. For that, here at my company we use the APC InfraStruXure (ISX) manager appliance, since all of our power equipment is APC. It's a nice little 1U rackmount that manages all APC devices you point it at, and it's a central point for management and monitoring/alerting. APC also has their own APC-branded (not NetBotz) line of environmental monitors which also have customizable input & output contacts, and they can be managed by the ISX manager appliance along with the power equipment.
If you do already have a variety of monitoring sensors, if they can communicate to the network, then presumably they can send SNMP traps? You could have those sent to any central SNMP monitoring system (like Zenoss) to have it actually send out the alerts.
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.
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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