Rancid integration and Zenoss Core

Greg sent me a note today suggesting that we look at the functionality in RANCID to augment Zenoss Core in it’s network management capabilities.

Here’s his suggestion:

“Configuration management / recovery / comparison of Network Switches, Routers etc.. is a key headache for IT Administrators. RANCID lets you automate that a bit and can be setup to notify you when a configuration has
changed. One way to do this might be to setup logging of events on the devices via SNMP traps or Syslog that will inform Zenoss of a configuration change, then fire off a RANCID session to pull the configuration, diff it and then notify the appropriate people of the changes. This could be extended to system configuration files (think /etc/ directory)”

Now you can do some of the change management pieces in Zenoss Core but the key part of diff it and notify the appropriate people of the changes including what has changed is the key difference. Is this interesting to you as Zenoss Users is there any additional nuance that would make this useful?

I opened a ticket in Trac if others want to add other ideas and thoughts.