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Zenoss Newsletter - June 2009 »

By Mark Hinkle on Jul 2, 2009 in Company | 0 Comments

This has been a big month at Zenoss, early in May we released Zenoss Core 2.4 with the help of our community beta-testers and contributors. In the beginning of June is also the release of Zenoss Enterprise 2.4 featuring our brand new Big 4 Break-Free Guarantee. What’s next? Our Community Manager Matt Ray is also busy working on our own Summer of Community project working with our community to create lots of new Zenpacks over the next three months, so get involved today!

Zenoss Enterprise 2.4

Zenoss Enterprise 2.4 comes with an industry-first guarantee of 50% or more cost savings on licensing, maintenance, and deployment compared to traditional products from HP, IBM, CA, and BMC.

Zenoss Enterprise 2.4 not only offers a guarantee but the following new features:

  • Normalization of Metrics Across Heterogeneous Technologies
  • Scalable Secure, Monitoring of Linux/Unix Servers
  • Monitoring of Internal or External Web Services
  • Expanded Device and Applications Support
  • Simplified Setup and Configuration

Read more >>

Sign Up for a Zenoss Enterprise Guided Tour

We are very excited about the new features in Zenoss Enterprise and we want you to have the chance to witness them yourself. So every week we will be conducting a demo of Zenoss Enterprise where you can see Zenoss monitoring in action. Sign-up today and see what all the hype is about!

Read more >>

Summer of Community ZenPacks Contest

To help kick off the new Zenoss 2.4 release, we’ve decided to jumpstart the creation of new ZenPacks with another Community ZenPack Contest. 2009 has already been off to a great start, there are new ZenPacks for HP ProLiants, Printer Toner, an Event Views Portlet, and even several new reports. In the Zenoss forums there are a wide variety of ZenPacks being discussed and tested, but we wanted to really kickstart the process. So we’re announcing a Summer of Community ZenPacks Contest with not 1, but 5 great prizes!

Read more >>

Getting Started Webinar

Does Zenoss look cool but you need a helping hand to get started? We offer regular instructor-led webinars where you can follow along as we install and configure Zenoss Core. Then you can ask your questions where Zenoss Engineers can answer your most press questions. Here is an example of what the last attendees asked and the answers to their questions.

Read more >>

Tip of the Month: Event Suppression

This month you get two tips for the prices of one from Zenoss engineers Chet Luther and Chip Holden. First, from Chet we have an event transform for suppressing all further events from a device when they are unreachable by ping.The second tip comes from Chip “mrchippy” Holden on how to stop all events from a location when a router to that location goes down.

Read more >>

Thank you for your Feedback

We had some great testimonials from those who participated in our April Survey. Thanks to John Burkhart and Mike Loven and everyone else for their kind words. Also each month we draw from submissions during our download survey for a cool open source Chumby. The winner for April is Thomas Olsen. Congratulations Thomas! Take survey today and you could be a winner too!

Thank you for your interest and support for Zenoss.

Mark Hinkle, VP of Community

Mark R. Hinkle

Vice President, Community

Zenoss Inc.
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mrhinkle

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Q&A Session for Getting Started with Zenoss »

By Mark Hinkle on Jul 2, 2009 in Best Practices, Tips, Zenoss Software | 0 Comments

Here are the questions and answers from this week’s Getting Started With Zenoss session. These are a good source of information for those people starting to use Zenoss. If you would like to attend a future online training session you can reserve your spot today.

Q: How can we monitor from our site the connection between a NAS device at customer site and the offsite backup data center?

A: you could add the router at the offsite back up location to the ping class. if the router is not pingable, you will get an alert and you will know connection is down.

Q: How can we monitor a process on a customer’s Windows server which is connected to a monitored NAS ?

A: Windows process monitoring can be accomplished by SNMP. You must enable SNMP in windows. See the admin guide for “How to configure windows devices”.

Q: Does the Zenoss VMAppliance have the zenpack already installed?

A: the Zenoss VMware Appliance is the Zenoss CORE application only. The Zenoss Core-Zenpacks package must be installed separately. The appliance is a good choice if you have only  a windows machine available to test out Zenoss. If you have a CentOS, RHEL, or other supported Zenoss Core platform, I recommend you install on that.

Q: in the commercial version, are there any Linux distributions not supported?

A: almost any linux distro can be monitored - if net-snmmp is supported - we can likely monitor it, but each system needs to be tested. Some distributions can present issues due to the lack of a net-snmp binary and/or host resource MIB. If considering Zenoss Enterprise, please ask your sales contact about any specific distributions that you will need to monitor.

Q: Can a particular filesystem for a particular device be ignored for alerst (for example, drives which are naturally full)?

A: yes - there is zProperty called zFileSystemMapIgnoreNames in which you can specify a regex to ignore file systems. see admin guide for more info on zProperties. You can also use alerting rules and event transforms to further customize your alert strategy.

Q: How do you create a default location?

A: click on Locations (in left nav), click on “Down Arrow” beside the “Sub-Locations”, choose “Add New Organizer”

Q: Can I monitor voip on a cisco device?

A: In core, you can monitor syslog and trap events - which will give you some view of your VOIP. Monitoring VOIP may mean different things to different groups.  We monitor Cisco IP-SLA in Enterprise, which is a common way to measure VOIP related performance.

Q: Is there any differnce between sorting by “group” and sorting by “system” in regards to Zenoss features?

A: no difference from a feature perspective. These are simply “buckets” in which you can classify your devices. You can then use these “buckets” to help filter your alerting / event rules.

Q: is there a way to add a device manually? Without using the auto-detect feature?

A: Yes. You can choose the “Add Device” link from the left navigation menu. You can also choose add device from the page menu directly within the device class you want to put the device. And lastly, you can add without any modeling by simply setting the “protocol” to “none”.

Q: what is the difference between /Server/Linux and /Server/SSH/Linux?

A: /Server/Linux will perform SNMP based modeling and monitoring, /Server/SSH/Linux will use SSH connectivity to model and monitor your device. SNMP is by far the preferred method but SSH can be used when SNMP is not possible.

Q:  Is it possible to add any of the graphs for a device to the portlets?

There is a community zenpack that seems to accomplish this task. Please see http://community.zenoss.org/trac-zenpacks/ and look for “Show Graph Portlet” zenpack.

Q: Under the networks tab in my Zenoss install it auto-discovers many networks that are not actually in my environment that I do not want to monitor.  When I remove them they come back the next day.  Is there any way to stop that from happening?

A: Add a regex that matches them to zLocalIpAddresses. Any IP that is matched by this regex won’t create an entry in /Networks.

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Summer of ZenPacks Contest Progress Report »

By Matt Ray on Jun 26, 2009 in Best Practices, Community, News Items, Open Source, Systems Management, Tips, Twisted, Zenpacks | 0 Comments

The Zenoss Summer of Community ZenPacks Contest is still going strong and has had a tremendous response so far, and we’re not even halfway through! We’ve already had more entries than last year’s contest and we’re on track to potentially double that.

There have been a lot of really great entries, here is a quick rundown of all the ZenPacks so far:

For a complete list of all the Community ZenPacks that are available, please visit: http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/

For Community ZenPack development and further information, please visit the Community ZenPack Repository

Thanks again to everyone who contributed their ZenPacks to the Zenoss Community so far, looking forward to more entries!

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Getting Started With Zenoss Core Webinar June 30 »

By Matt Ray on Jun 26, 2009 in Best Practices, Community, Events, Systems Management, Tips | 0 Comments

Have you recently downloaded Zenoss Core, or do you have questions implementing the solution in your environment? If so, please register to attend our bi-weekly Getting Started with Zenoss Core Webinar. The June 30 session is still open for sign-up, if you can’t make this session, the next one is already on the schedule. You can register for either one here:

Tuesday, June 30 9:00 a.m. EDT

Thursday, July 9 12:00 p.m. EDT

Here’s what you’ll get out of the session:

  • Installing the software properly
  • Preparing your environment
  • Logging in to get started
  • Adding, classifying and auto-discovering your devices
  • Getting and staying organized
  • Seeing the “big picture” (dashboard, network map, event console, Google Maps, etc.)
  • Avoiding common mistakes

We also have a Zenoss engineer available to answer questions live – and believe me, there are plenty of questions submitted! If you’re interested in seeing past Q&A logs, take a look at some of the previous sessions on the Zenoss blog where we document and upload all of the questions submitted along with answers. We will update this post with the Q&A from the webinar after the session is over.

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Zenoss 2.4.2 is Now Available »

By Matt Ray on Jun 25, 2009 in Community, Events, News Items, Systems Management, Zenoss Software | 0 Comments

We are proud to announce the Zenoss 2.4.2 maintenance release which fixes several critical issues. Zenoss Core 2.4.2 is now available for download:
http://www.zenoss.com/download

The 2.4.2 release notes are available for download (PDF).

Installation and upgrades from earlier versions are covered in the unified Zenoss Core 2.4 Installation Guide (PDF).

This is primarily a stability release that addresses these 46 tickets. Thanks again for your feedback!

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