I am always happy to see new Zenoss users trying out Zenoss. I am even happier when they have a good experience. Jason McNeil is a new Zenoss user who is setting up Zenoss Core on Sun hardware running SUSE Linux to monitor his network. Here’s what he has to say about all of you.

The community is also friendly, the couple of times I did post for help on the user forum I received a fast/friendly/knowledgeable reply within a couple hours.

Well done.

He’s also updating the SysAdmin Wiki with what he has learned. It’s a nice resource for Zenoss users and sysadmins alike.

Tags: Community, Kudos, zenoss core

The results are in and it’s time to announce the winners of the Zenoss Submit a ZenPack Contest. There were a whole lot of exceptional entries over the past few weeks. We had a tremendous response and there were 25 entries, more than doubling the number of Zenoss Community ZenPacks available for download.

The winners have been chosen and they are Zenoss Community members Andrea Consadori and Fabio Paracchini.

SQL Server 2000/2005 Performance ZenPack http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/sql-server-performance

Contributed by Community member Fabio Paracchini, this ZenPack is for monitoring SQL Server Performance and works with SQL 2000 and SQL 2005. Highlights include graph the most significant counters for SQL Server:

• Cache Hit Ratio
• Transactions per second
• Locks requests per second
• Lock wait time
• Full table scans per second

Asterisk Monitoring ZenPack http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/asterisk

Submitted by Community member Andrea ‘konsa79′ Consadori, this ZenPack is for monitoring Asterisk server and VOIP statistics via the Asterisk Monitoring Interface. It can be used for multiple Asterisk instances, and is under active use and improvement.

For a complete list of all the entries from the contest:
http://blog.zenoss.com/2008/08/20/the-submit-a-zenpack-contest-entries/
For a list of all the available ZenPacks, check out the ZenPacks site: http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/

A great big thanks to Fabio, Andrea and all the other contributors!

Tags: Asterisk, Community, sqlserver, Zenoss, Zenoss Software, Zenpacks

The Zenoss Submit a ZenPack Contest is in its last week and we have gotten a tremendous Community response. We have had a total of 18 entries so far, and time is running out to get your entries in to win an Asus Eee PC laptop. Here are the last 5 entries since the last update.

NetApp Volume ZenPack
http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/netappvolume
Updated by Community member Eric Becker, this is a refresh to Nathaniel McCallum’s NetApp Volume ZenPack with improvements to scalability and large volumes.

Show Graph Portlet ZenPack
http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/graph-portlet
Submitted by Community member Anton Menshutin, this ZenPack adds a portlet called “Show Graph” which enables users to show any graph/multi graph reports on their dashboard. Several columns (as defined in report options) are supported.

Cisco Interfaces ZenPack
http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/cisco-interfaces
Community member Chris Krough has submitted this Cisco Interfaces ZenPack.
* Adds Products/CiscoInterfaces/modeler/plugins/CiscoInterfaceMap.py which recognizes the interface types for these templates
* On interfaces types which have a graph defined, most of the graph commands will be pulled from the Custom Graph Definition.

Cyclades Console Servers ZenPack
http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/cyclades-console-servers
Submitted by Community member Colin ‘chudler’ Hudler, this ZenPack is for Cyclades Console servers. It has been tested against Alterpath Cyclades (Avocent) ACS48 Devices, but should work against any Cyclades ACSxx device.

Powerware UPS Monitoring ZenPack
http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/powerware-ups
Provided by Community member Alexander Vorobiyov, this ZenPack provides voltages stats, load, ambient temperature, battery capacity and more for Powerware UPS products. UPS status is found through the the SNMP oids.

For this and other ZenPacks, check out the ZenPacks site:
http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/

Thanks Eric, Anton, Chris, Colin and Alexander!

Tags: cisco, Community, cyclades, monitoring, netapp, powerware, Zenoss, Zenpack

Thanks to Infoworld who named Zenoss Core Best of Open Source for Network Monitoring.  Infoworld describes Zenoss as as a scalable and easy-to-use replacement for legacy management architecture.

InfoWorld’s annual BOSSIES recognize the best free and open source software the world has to offer to businesses, IT professionals, and productive individuals who rely on computers to get work done.

This is quite an honor. Thanks to everyone who has helped make Zenoss Core award-winning.

Tags: Award, Bossie, network monitoring, Open Source

SingleHop, a fast-growing full service managed hosting provider is another happy Zenoss Core user. According to SingleHop’s VP of Operations, Andy Pace,

“Zenoss is Nagios done right, with frosting and a cherry on top!”

He goes on to say even more (this is such high praise, I can’t help but quote liberally):

SingleHop utilizes this brilliant piece of software to monitor network statistics and customer servers. Zenoss is rich with many features that sets it above the competition.

Auto-discovery, which is the automatic importing of services into the Zenoss database, is one of the many bells and whistles that Zenoss offers. This not only allows us to schedule discoveries to add new customers to our monitoring system, but it also adds device configuration details including interfaces, memory, disk, OS, services, processes and installed software.”

Thanks for the kind words, Andy, and thanks for using Zenoss Core.