This month we released Zenoss Professional Edition for the needs of medium-sized IT organizations. Join Chris Farrell for one of our upcoming webinars as he discusses the benefits of Zenoss and this exciting new solution.

• October 31, 2:00 p.m. ET
• November 4, 10:00 a.m. ET

Zenoss 2.3 is Coming

In November we will be launching Zenoss 2.3. Thanks to your feedback we believe this will be our best release to date. We invite you to participate in the beta featuring stack installers for 32-bit and 64-bit Linux distributions and our first ever installer for Mac OS X. The beta is already progressing well and we appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting from the community in our Zenoss-testing forum. Stay tuned for our release announcement.

Tip of the Month: Per Filesystem Thresholds

In a recent forum post one of our users (ccole) shared an event transform to create unique thresholds per filesystem monitored. Our resident support guru Chet Luther added some additional information for this month’s tip.

Government Podcast with Redhat

Listen to Zenoss CEO Bill Karpovich as he discusses Zenoss’ success in bringing its Open Source IT Management Solution to the Federal Marketplace through partnerships with DLT Solutions and Red Hat. Download the mp3 (09:20 minutes).

Zenoss Product Survey

Even though we are excited about the upcoming 2.3 release we are already looking at which exciting new features to add in future releases. For example, are you interested in NetFlow support, an improved user interface, or binary support for your favorite Linux distribution? Let us know and be registered to win an open source Chumby interactive media player.

Getting Started with Zenoss Guide

In past user surveys you have told us that we should improve our documentation, so we listened. Sharon Hastings, our new documentation writer has been collaborating with our support engineer Simon Jakesch and the rest of the Zenoss team to author a new Getting Started with Zenoss Guide (PDF).

In The News

See what people are saying about Zenoss this month.

The 451 Group: GOSCON gives Government Good Open Source Ideas

IT management Podcast #23: Buying Milk in Rocket Cars

Linux Basement Podcast: Zenoss Rules

The 451 Group: Big 4 customers not only target for open source

Information Week: Infrastructure Management Startups Bring Big-Company Capabilities To SMBs

CNET: Zenoss aims at small and medium businesses, hits big enterprises

Information Week: Zenoss Aims Systems Management At Midsized IT

Thank you for your support.

Best Regards,

Mark R. Hinkle
Vice President, Community
Zenoss Inc.

We’re happy to announce we’re releasing our new Getting Started With Zenoss guide to help ease new users into understanding Zenoss and what it can do for them. It’s intended to help you navigate the application and quickly walk you through several basic tasks that demonstrate Zenoss’ capabilities. After logging in to Zenoss, you will learn how to:
• Add a device, and then view its status and performance details
• Set up, observe, and acknowledge an alert

There are sections that dive a little deeper into the user interface and system features, and show you how to:
• Configure your network for Zenoss
• Add devices to Zenoss through discovery, and then use device classes to monitor them
• Monitor devices and servers, using thresholds for performance event generation
• Create and manage user accounts

Please check it out, we think there’s a lot of useful content and that it’s a great introduction for new and veteran Zenoss users alike.

Getting Started With Zenoss (PDF)

Tags: Community, docs, pdf, Zenoss

We all had a great time in Columbus at the Ohio LinuxFest with the Open Source Community. There were well over a thousand enthusiasts who turned out and we talked to quite a few of them. We gave an on-stage demo as well as lots of quick one-on-ones at our booth. Lots of users stopped by and and we got a chance to talk with members of lots of other projects and communities. We even made an appearance on The Linux Basement. There is quite a bit of followup to do, and lots of interesting connections were made that we’ll revisit later. We gave away a Chumby to Michael Dollard from North Canton, OH from our drawing. Ohio LinuxFest was a great community event, we’ll be there again next year!

The latest stable packaged version of Zenoss Core, version 2.2.4, is now available for download. Zenoss Core 2.2.4 is available from:
http://www.zenoss.com/download
and the release notes are available here:
2.2.4 Release Notes

Installation and upgrades from earlier versions are now covered in a unified document available here:
Zenoss 2.2.4 Install Guide (PDF)

This is a maintenance release that addresses the following issues, by component:
2.2.4 Verified Defects

Tags: core, enterprise, release, software, Zenoss

Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, September 25 at 11am EDT in the #zenoss IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (port 6667). Please drop in and bring your questions, answers, suggestions and feedback. Community Manager Matt Ray and Developer Brian Edwards will answer your questions on Zenoss, IPSec and SEC football.

We’ll log the session and repost them here if you can’t make it.

Don’t forget you can search for answers to common questions by visiting the Zenoss forums.

UPDATE:
Here’s last Thursday’s IRC log

http://www.zenoss.com/community/discuss/irc/archives/dev-chat-09-25-2008
other logs are available here:

http://www.zenoss.com/community/discuss/irc

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

In the recent IT Management Podcast #18, Jane Curry from Skills 1st joins hosts Michael Cote’ and John Willis to talk about her recent paper “Open Source Management Options”. In the interview they discuss her extensive background as a Tivoli consultant and her investigation of Open Source platforms for network management. The paper focuses on her evaluation of Nagios, OpenNMS and Zenoss and she discusses each in the podcast and positions them against each other and other commercial products. It’s a great listen and she makes a lot of relevant points, check it out!

http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2008/09/12/it-management-018/

http://www.skills-1st.co.uk/papers/jane/open_source_mgmt_options.pdf

Tags: Community, reviews, Zenoss

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 has concluded and first off, we would like to thank all the generous contributors to the contest! We had a tremendous response rate, more than doubling the number of Community ZenPacks that were available before the contest. There were a lot of really great entries, we’ll be announcing the winners shortly.

Here is a quick rundown of all the entries:

NEW ZenPacks:
• AIX monitoring:
  temporarily unavailable
• ASSP Anti-Spam Monitor:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/assp-antispam
• Asterisk Monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/asterisk
• BlueCoat Appliances:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/bluecoat
• Brocade Switches Graphing:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/brocade-switches
• Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/cisco-asa
• Cisco Interfaces: temporarily unavailable
• Colubris Wireless monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/colubris
• Cyclades Console Servers:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/cyclades-console-servers
• EMC Celerra NAS:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/celerra
• Improved Linux monitoring:
  temporarily unavailable
• MIB Browser:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/mib-browser
• MRV Wireless monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/mrv
• Nagios Check Ping:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/nagios-check-ping
• OpenLayers Map Portlet:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/open-layers-map
• PostgreSQL monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/postgresql
• Powerware UPS monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/powerware-ups
• Raytalk monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/raytalk
• SQL Server 2000/2005 Performance monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/sql-server-performance
• Show Graph Portlet:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/graph-portlet
• WMI Files Monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/wmifilesmonitor

UPDATED ZenPacks:
• Alvarion WiFi monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/alvarion
• Funkwerk router monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/funkwerk
• Netasq firewall monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/netasq
• NetApp Volume monitoring:
  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/netappvolume

For a complete list of all the Community ZenPacks that are available, please visit:

http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/

Thanks again to everyone who contributed their ZenPacks to the Zenoss Community!

Tags: Asus Eee, contest, network monitoring, Zenpack

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