Zenoss Core 1.1 - It just keeps getting better

Zenoss Core 1.1 has been out for a few days and we want to know what you think. We feel this release is a big deal for a couple main reasons. First, it puts automatic configuration change tracking within reach of every organization, not just the largest. To my knowledge, Zenoss Core 1.1 is the first ever open source enterprise IT monitoring solution to offer this key feature for organizations that want to get a better handle on change management. Knowing that changes were made is step one in this process, and with the kinds of distributed, decentralized environments that most organizations run nowadays, most solutions that promise a centralized view of changes impose a big efficiency, implementation and cost tax in order to get the functionality. With Zenoss Core 1.1, getting this functionality is easy.

Be among the first ten people to tell us about your experience with 1.1 (just comment on this blog entry and send your contact info to gwallace_at_zenoss.com) and I’ll send you a Zenoss hat. Also feel free to log into our Trac system to submit a feature request, all suggestions are welcome.

For 1.1 we listened to what you had to say and added some important features here’s what our CTO Erik Dahl has to say about the release: “We focused on change tracking in particular after surveying attendees at the recent Large Installation Systems Administrator conference in Washington D.C. They told us that configuration tracking is the second most pressing systems management need after monitoring.”

Here’s some more details about this feature:

• Automatically detect and log changes to network and server configurations
• View reports of changes at a node level or group level over time
• Automatically notify operators of configuration changes using alerting rules

The second big feature in 1.1 is Automatic Remediation which allows you to trigger actions based on certain thresholds. This is huge, you could trigger shell scripts n to remove old logs when your disks get full automatically, or restart a service that has stopped responding.

1.1 lets you set thresholds and select from standard actions (start/stop) or implement custom scripts to affect a change. You’re in total control. Now, we’re not the first guys to do this, but let me tell what is new. As Zenoss users write scripts and build knowledge about events, our community infrastructure will allow you to share this knowledge. It’s all about not reinventing the wheel.

In addition, 1.1 enhances two other existing features of the product:

Expanded Reports and Export

• New cross-system reports on availability, performance metrics and event classes added to the standard report library
• Supports export of all reports to flat files for importing and analysis in spreadsheet tools and other systems

User Interface Enhancements

• 100% administrable through web-based GUI, including viewing of Zenoss log files, starting/stopping Zenoss daemons, etc.
• Ability to zoom and pan time-series performance graphs through an AJAX component for easier problem identification and analysis