Community member Nathaniel McCallum’s provided instructions for making Zenoss use LDAP or ActiveDirectory for Authentication and Authorization recently had a very important update from Scott Haskell. Users were reporting very slow UI response times and Scott narrowed it down to those installations using LDAP. He tracked down the Zope RAM Cache Manager and updated the documentation on how to greatly improve performance:

Enabling Caching

LDAPMultiPlugins has the ability to cache expensive LDAP look-ups and other operations. This ability, however, is not enabled by default. To enable caching:

• Login to the ZMI (Zope Management Interface) at http://servername:8080/zport/manage
• Click on ‘acl_users(PAS)’ from the center pane or the top-level ‘acl_users’ from the left navigation pane
• From the drop-down list in the upper right, select ‘RAM Cache Manager’ and click add.
• Give the RAM Cache Object a name; e.g. - LDAP Cache
• Click on the newly created object to configure it
• Tweak the properties as needed
• Click on the ‘Associate’ tab
• Click ‘Locate’
• Your LDAPMultiPlugins object (whatever you named it) and userManager will appear as objects that you can associate with the RAM Cache.
• Check your LDAPMultiPlugin object and select ‘Save Changes’.

Caching is now enabled for LDAP.

Scott went even further and documented his debugging and troubleshooting of the problem. Thanks again to Scott for this great tip!

Tags: Community, ldap, tip, Zenoss, Zope

This tip was courtesy of Chet Luther one of our services team.

Normally when you create a threshold, you have to choose the upper and/or lower limits. Sometimes you want these limits to vary considerably for different devices. It can be a lot of work to create many copies of the same template just so you can define different threshold values. However, there is a better way to solve this problem!

For this example we’ll create a property-driven threshold for the standard FileSystem template. This will allow us to setup a single threshold on the FileSystem template in the /Server device class and use a custom property at the device or even device class level to control its behavior.

First Step: Create the custom property

1. Go to /Devices
2. Click on the menu and choose More -> Custom Schema
3. Add a property:
   • Label = Maximum file system utilization
   • Name = cThreshMaxFileSystem
   • Type = int
   • Default = 90
   • Visible = True

Second Step: Create the property-driven threshold

1. Go to /Devices/Server
2. Click on the Templates tab
3. Click into the FileSystem template
4. Delete the existing Free Space 90 Percent threshold
5. Add a new threshold named nearly full:
   • Select usedBlocks_usedBlocks from the data points
   • Set the max value to:
     (here.totalBlocks) * (here.cThreshMaxFileSystem / 100.0)

Now you can go to the custom properties/schema of any device class or device and set what the percentage at which your file system threshold will trigger just by overriding the cThreshMaxFileSystem property.

At Zenoss, we are very fortunate to have a group of very passionate community members.  They are very vocal and they do not hesitate to praise as well as criticize us.  Our forum provides a good medium to capture general requests and rants, but we felt that we also needed to capture great anecdotes and best practices we hear from our community.  Recently, we had a chance to visit some of our customers around the nation and capture their experiences, best practices, etc.  We learned a lot from our visits and we documented them by capturing our community’s stories on video as well as print.  Two of those stories have already been released and can be found at http://www.zenoss.com/product/case-studies/case-studies .  You can find links to both Medifast and Mercy stories from both a C-Level and a SysAdmin perspective.  We hope that you enjoy watching them as well as we enjoyed documenting them.  Let us know if you would be interested in telling us your Zenoss story and become a Zenoss Video Star. 

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.

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.