I was browsing our web logs this week and realized that a lot of other open source (and some proprietary) monitoring companies spend a great deal of time on our web site trying to figure out what we are up to. So today’s post is dedicated to saving them time so they can focus on making really good software and spend less time worrying about us. Here’s a little video sneak peak of Zenoss 2.1 Beta produced from their point of view:

http://tinyurl.com/2eete

I got this as part of the Zenoss comment spam today and it was too funny. Note the highlighted portion of his pitch.

“hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq XXXXX or write me XXXXXX(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you”

I was tempted to reply to Richard with this note:

Richard, this sounds like an excellent deal. Can your provide some references? Can you introduce me to your friends? I am trying to help the deposed billionaire prince of Nigeria get his fortune out of the country, maybe they can help me get the word out. Best Regards, Mark

When you work in technology it’s hard to explain to your non-technical friends and family members (especially when you work in open source) what you do. Conversations with your elder family members go something like this:

Me: I went to work for an open source software company.
Grandma: Oh that’s nice….what’s open source software?
Me: It’s software that’s free to download and can be altered and redistributed by anyone.
Grandma (puzzled look): Then how do you make money if you give it away?
Me: Well we offer support and service for the software.
Grandma (confused look): That’s nice, I guess.

Today we were featured in the Baltimore Sun a paper my Grandmother reads, as do the relatives of many other Zenoss employees. I suspect today’s conversation will go something like this.

Grandma: I see your company is in the paper. Your company must be very important.
Me: Yes it is.
Grandma: I see they use it in hospitals, I am sure my doctor uses it then.
Me (chuckling): Yep Grandma, I am sure he does.

Today’s news has been peppered with the outage of the Windows Genuine Advantage servers today. Now we aren’t endorsing DRM rights by any means but if you are running mission critical servers you need to look beyond availability monitoring. If the system is customer facing you probably will know by the inquiries from angry customers soon enough that your servers are down. That’s why having a view of system performance is helpful to prevent outages and to prevent them.
For example, say you are only monitoring for availability you only know that a server is down once everyone else does. The ideal situation is to monitor both performance and availability. For example, say you are monitoring a web server, you might want to use Zenoss to monitor performance and set alerts when that web server reaches 90% CPU utilization so you can check to see how long before the CPU pegs and your web server becomes unresponsive. You also may want to look at the processes for your application servers like Tomkat Tomcat or JBoss, the more information and the more likely you are to prevent many outages.
You could also use our Zenoss Enterprise to monitor web transactions like form submissions (think shopping carts) to validate that not only is the website up but the mechanics are running as desired.

I am sure that Microsoft monitors their infrastructure. However, in case they need a new solution the offer is open download Zenoss Core for free and give us a call if you need help.

Today is SysAdmin Day. in honor of all the underpaid, overworked, answering your pager in the middle of the night guys and girls working hard to keep things running this one goes out to you.

One of the first things I notice when someone starts to work at Zenoss is how they pronounce Zenoss. Our new VP of products Murat Aksu also noticed the differences. So he took a camera and started asking others how they pronounced Zenoss and we got a funny little string of videos. Click on the picture below to see the video on YouTube.

Thanks, to all the participants including:
Anthony Gold, VP and GM, Open Source, Unisys
Michelle Perry, CMO of SourceFire
Greg Wallace, Project Lead, NetDirector, Open Source Configuration Management
Peter Mui, Community Manager, GroundWork Open Source
Whurley, Chief Open Source Architect, BMC
Chris Harrick, PM, SugarCRM

Today we are doing an internal training session for all our employees. I figured I would try to capture as many tidbits from the training as I could. First, off the training group is quite the motley crew. From left to right there’s Matt Granger, our Senior Director of Services and Support, Sam Husckins, our web dude, In the center that’s Bill Karpovich our CEO, and general disruptive classroom influence. On the far right that’s Drew the Docs guy. And the guy in the black shirt is Professor Erik Dahl, our CTO.

Stay tuned for some technical information that might actually be helpful later today.

No not that one… the liquid kind. Several years ago I got an ulcer. The reason why is really another story… Anyway the result, which is more relevant, is that I no longer drink coffee, hard liquor or soft drinks. As we have brought more people into the company we started buying soft drinks as a little perk.

What I noticed after a while was a certain pickiness on the part of those partaking in the drinks. They seemed to need many flavors of one particular beverage, coke. OK, I understand that there is regular coke and diet coke. Although, if you need diet coke why not just drink water? When I finally decided to pay attention to what was going on I was shocked to find four different types of coke being consumed: Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine free Diet Coke, and Coke Zero. I have never even heard of that last one! What are these guys a bunch of coke connoisseurs? I have enclosed the photographic evidence of this phenomena. Clearly, zenoss is powered by more than great software… its Powered By Coke!

P.S. the water is all mine… no idea how that corona got in there.

-EAD

I was walking through the Zenoss office today, and noticed we had a few plants. One orchid which is impossible to kill and a few others that looked pretty bad. In fancy offices of established companies I guess they have services that come in and water. Here’s what you get when you are a technology start-up:

Stumpy the Reception Area Plant	Kelly’s Lovely Flower

So if you work at a start-up, go for the plastic plants.