Zenoss is more than happy to announce our sponsorship of Software Freedom Day 2008! Zenoss is committed to supporting the open source community and to helping spread the adoption of open source software. We see first hand the positive impact our software has on businesses, government, and educational institutions around the world, and want to participate in the growth and evangelism of open source software like ours. As a sponsor of Software Freedom Day 2008 we hope to further expose software users and developers to the benefits of transparent, collaborative software development.

Zenoss Austin will be participating in local Software Freedom Day events sponsored by the Austin Linux Users Group and the Austin Ubuntu Team, please come out and join the fun! For more details: http://austinlug.org/node/294

Tags: austin, linux, software freedom day, ubuntu, user groups, Zenoss

Summer’s here at Zenoss Headquarters and it’s hot… and in our new Austin Engineering Center it’s sweltering. Luckily, that’s keeping us at our desks working on the next versions of Zenoss products.

While we have been working the Zenoss community has been rocking. You have done an awesome job with new ZenPacks and helping other users in the forums. Thank you for your support in making Zenoss the best community driven network management solution ever. To help reward everyone’s contributions we decided to go a little contest crazy this month as a sign of our appreciation.

Latest Versions of Zenoss

We released Zenoss 2.2.3 on July 23^rd which includes close to 100 bug fixes and feature enhancements. Zenoss Enterprise continues to improve as well. Take a look, request an evaluation today!

Submit a ZenPack Contest Rolls On

Last month we announced the “Submit a ZenPack Contest” with not one but two great prizes! We have received 15 ZenPacks including ones for Brocade Switches, EMC NAS and a new improved Linux ZenPack. Read the Zenoss blog to find out about some of how you can win an Asus Eee PC laptop.

Tip of the Month: Add Lots of Devices

We are going to give our Zenoss support guru Chet the month off and highlight some FAQs from community member Jim Shank on adding large numbers of devices to Zenoss:

• Mass Adding Devices using Zendmd
• Import devices from CSV with location information

Improve Zenoss, School the New Guy!

We recently hired Brandon Whichard to guide the development of our future Zenoss products. Here’s your chance to be heard by the Zenoss Product Manager on enhancements to Zenoss. Complete the survey and be entered to win an iPod touch.

Testify: Tell us your Story and Win

The best way for people to understand why Zenoss is a great network management solution is to have someone who uses Zenoss everyone explain the benefits. So here’s the deal, tell your Zenoss story, inspire other Zenoss users and win a cool Neuros Open Embedded Media Center.

In The News

See what people are saying about Zenoss this month.

OmniTraining: We Can Ditch Nagios Now

Free Software Magazine: Zenoss: A Great System Monitoring Program which tries to do everything right

SAGE News: Open Source Entperise Monitoring Review

Linux Journal: Zen and the Art of Monitoring

Best Regards,

Mark R. Hinkle
Vice President, Community
Zenoss Inc.

Tags: network monitoring, newsletter, Zenoss

This week the winners of the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards were announced at OSCON. I wanted to thank everyone who voted for us. We were nominated in three categories which was quite a feat. I think this is a testament to the enthusiasm of our users in a relatively small project  (when compared to the likes of Drupal, Linux and OpenOffice.org.

Information Week’s Sergar Yegulaip has coverage of the awards ceremony and a great quote from SourceForge’s Community Manager Ross Turk who has been extremely helpful in making the Zenoss Core project a success.

“One thing I was fairly certain of, since this had happened to me, was that some of Ross’ own favorite projects probably didn’t win anything. In my case, it was 7-Zip and PortableApps, but I was curious what Ross’ favorites were.

“We’d have to be Switzerland to not take sides, but if that wasn’t the case, I wanted Zenoss to win something. And I can say that because I myself have no control over the project!”

Here’s the list of the winners in the categories we were nominated in. I think given that the two projects that edged us out have millions of users and we have thousands makes it tough for us to win (though as fast as people are adopting Zenoss we are hopeful for the future). We would like to offer our congratulations to the following projects.

• Best Project for the Enterprise »OpenOffice.org
  http://www.openoffice.org

• Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition »phpMyAdmin
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin

• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins »phpMyAdmin
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin

Thanks again to everyone that voted for Zenoss, and for your continuing support.

Tags: awards, community choice, Open Source, SourceForge

Zenny the Zebra and the Future of IT Mangagement - We tried to recruit a new contributor but we are going to wait until he gets to junor high before we expect his first Zenpack. For those of you who are old enough feel free to submit yours.

Vote for your favourite monitoring tool - Hopefully it’s Zenoss, if not it’s Matt’s fault

Matt Ray Co-hosts the IT Management Guys Podcast - Matt helped co-host the IT management Podcast last week despite having a cold he did a good job.

Tech Teapot: Open Source Management Comparison - Jack is doing a comparison of open source management solutions.

Zenoss: a great system monitoring program which tries to do everything right - Free Sooftware Magazine published an eBook on Zenoss this week, good feedback from a hobbyist user.

In case you missed the press release, we announced our Gold Sponsorship of the Twisted Software Foundation. We think this is important because as CTO Erik Dahl said:

“At Zenoss our software lives and breathes Twisted, and as a commercial open source company we feel it’s important to give back to the projects we use.”

It also helps when they share our vision for open source in the enterprise and provide the tools to make it happen.

“As early as two years ago, many people still questioned the use of open source software in the enterprise,” said Glyph Lefkowitz, founder of Twisted. “Forward-thinking companies like Zenoss are proving that through collaboration and community involvement open source software is not only ready for, but can excel in, an enterprise environment. The Twisted project enables companies like Zenoss to benefit from the collective input of a highly technical and savvy community.”

Zenoss is grateful for the support of our partners, community and customers and we’re always eager to help those who help us. Thanks again for your support.

My name is Matt Ray and I recently joined Zenoss as the new Community Manager, based out of their new Austin office. Through the fortuitous mix of Barcamp ESM, a dash of big-company reality, and my side business going dormant, I’m now a happy member of the Zenoss community. I’m here to to help build, strengthen and support Zenoss’ community because they are the ones who use and help support, guide and write the software we provide as a company. I’ll be active in every community-facing aspect I can, and you’ll find me on the forums and mailing lists, IRC, blogs and email asking lots of questions and trying to find as many answers as I can. Thanks in advance for your assistance and patience.

While my last job was at one of “The Big 4″ as a Java developer, I’ve been involved with the Open Source community in various forms for over 10 years. I’ve worked in Systems Management, retail, distributed computing, banking, scientific and educational software over the years and I’ve been at several startups and founded a few myself. While I’m a fairly new to the Python community, I’ve coded in Java, Ruby, Perl, C, Lisp and many other languages professionally and for fun so I hope to get into the swing of things pretty fast.

I’ll be posting on topics of interest to the Zenoss user base, feel free to contact me with suggestions, feedback, questions or answers.

• Email: mray@zenoss.com
• AIM: mrayzenoss
• Twitter: mattray
• IRC: #zenoss on irc.freenode.net as mrayzenoss
• Blog: The Shining Path of Least Resistance

Thanks,
Matt Ray
Zenoss Community Manager

42 Internetworks is doing a bake-off between Zenoss and some other vendors. In February they did a review of Zenoss Core and gave us a lukewarm reception. I suspect that’s because they didn’t have enough time and context to really dig into Zenoss (more on that later).
As those of you who are fans of Douglas Adams know the answer to everything is 42.

“internetworks” is the word internet was derived from and it’s defined as connecting two or more distinct computer networks together. These computer networks include everything managed by Information Technology (IT) - servers, applications, desktops, routers, switches, wireless devices, etc. Hence the name 42Internetworks.

While they endeavor to be the answer for all things Internetworking Zenoss endeavors to be the answer to networking management and monitoring.
The reason I mention this. Is that recently 42Internetworks stated that they haven’t gotten much user feedback from actual users on the bake-off from anyone but software vendors.

A couple weeks ago, we posted a thread about doing an unofficial bake-off. Since then we’ve only received emails and comments from vendors - no users. So this begs the question, are there any users reading this blog out there. If not, then maybe doing the bake-off isn’t that valuable.

Well let’s change that. 42Internetworks is looking to share good information on network monitoring and management.

We have thousands of successful community users who could help share their extensive systems management experience.

I encourage you to go to the 42Internetworks and help inform their bake-off.

Are you an exceptional team-oriented individual ready for a challenge? Do you love open source software? We are staffing for the following technical, sales, and marketing positions.

Channel Sales Manager, Client Support and Services Engineers, Core Developer, Inside Sales Associate, Community Manager
Senior Product Manager, Vice President of Engineering, Vice President of Marketing

Visit the Zenoss Career Center for more information.

Our own Simon Jakesch was a guest on the Hak5 podcast. Simon demonstrated Zenoss showing how to discover devices and monitor networks. This is one of the better primers we have on what Zenoss does and how it works complete with screencasts.

This week CBROnline published a story,”Big win for open source in IT management” about UTStarcom’s use of Zenoss. My favorite parts of the story are:

“Notch it up as a victory for open source over enterprise software. Zenoss, a provider of open source IT management software, has beaten off competition from four leading commercial software providers to land a deal at global technology firm UTStarcom.”

and this:

“We found solutions from the large vendors were pricey with recurring annual costs and consultancy fees, and lacked the flexibility along with ease of customization they needed,” said Ari Bose, CIO of UTStarcom.
Please visit CBROnline for the whole story and if you like it the story is posted on Digg, so if you are so inclined please: