Packt Publishing’s recently published book Zenoss Core Network and Systems Monitoring has started picking up reviews recently. We think it’s a great new guide for expanding your understanding and becoming more familiar with configuring, using, and adapting Zenoss Core.

• Roberto Galoppini’s Open Source Books: Zenoss Core
• James Pulver’s Reviewing the Zenoss Book from PACKT Publishing
• Dave Hope’s Book Review of Zenoss Core, Network and System Monitoring
• Scott Haskell’s Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring Review

The book was written by Zenoss community member Michael Badger who was passionate about our software and took it upon himself to share his knowledge. Packt Publishing has also added a nice excerpt on their site:
User Management in Zenoss.

Read the reviews and check out the software, we’re very proud that our software generates that kind of enthusiasm and hope that our efforts and the efforts of our community of users are evident as you use Zenoss Core. It’s available in hardcopy and as a PDF from Packt Publishing

Tags: book, Community, reviews, 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

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

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 we want you to tell your Zenoss story, inspire other Zenoss users and win a Neuros Open Embedded Media Center.

The Rules

1. Tell Us Your Zenoss Story. Where you use it, how long you have been using Zenoss, how many devices you monitor, what kinds of things you monitor, the more details the better.
2. You can use video or written submissions. Just send your entry or a link to your entry to community@zenoss.com,
3. We understand some organizations might have policies about disclosing details about their organization. If you can’t share your details publicly you can submit the details of your install without identifying your organization by using generic terms like a large electronics manufacturer or a federal government agency. You can also use a pseudonym if required by your employer. (Make sure to include your real name and contact information along with your entry so we can send you your prize if you win).
4. The best three Zenoss success stories will be chosen by the judges (Matt and Mark, the community dudes and no we don’t accept bribes).
5. By entering you agree to have your story posted on our websites and used in other public venues.
6. We will start publishing all the Zenoss testimonials in September.

The Prize: Three Neuros OSDs

The three best user success stories will receive the very cool Neuros OSD. The Neuros OSD connects to your TV or home theater system and allows you to archive all of your DVD and video content. Plus the Neuros OSD has an open source component just like Zenoss and it is very hackable.

Plug the Neuros OSD into your TV, connect your DVD Player or VCR, and hit play. Your movie will be safely and legally transferred into a digital library! It works with home movies too. Just plug your video camera into the OSD, push play, and your memories are digitized.

With the Neuros OSD, you can store hundreds of hours of video in one location (like an external hard drive), get rid of those bulky cases, put an end to DVD damage, and instantly access any of your videos with the push of a button on a remote. You can even transfer your video content to a portable device (video iPod, PSP, mobile phone, etc.) to watch on the go, or email your home movies to friends and family.

Tags: Neuros OSD, testimonials, Zenoss

I read this article tonight from ArsGeek on using Cacti, SmokePing, and Zenoss Core running on Ubuntu to create a complete open source network management stack. It’s good for us to see because as much as I wish that Zenoss Core met their needs to accomplish all of this on it’s own, but it’s nice to see that you can combine other open source solutions to create a solution that’s appealing to small companies and large companies like those that belong to the Fortune 1000.

However, that’s not the true topic of this post. What struck me was this linked about Jonathon.

“Jonathon was born with spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy. he’s spent his life in a wheelchair and although he has the mind of regular 15 year old, he’s unable to utilize his body and has difficulty speaking. Jonathon has a wonderful mind and personality trapped inside his body. He’s had 13 surgeries- 7 of those were major, the rest were just muscle
releases in his back, hips, feet, and eyes.”

“Jonathon’s use of his body is limited to some use of his left hand. He’s enriched his life through the idea of superheroes - people who can literally do anything. His love for superheroes and all that they stand for has helped him through some very rough times, for instance by taking on their personas before and after operations.”

Jonathon’s a comic book hero fan, as our some of us here at Zenoss. Jonathon’s dream is to attend ComicCon this spring to meet some of his heroes.

Anyhow, the folks at Arsgeek are working to help out Jonathon and we would like to do the same. I am working out how Zenoss is going to help out Jonathon. If you have the inclination we encourage you to help Jonathon realize his dream of attending ComicCon this spring.

[Photo courtesy of megadem]

Thanks to Adrian for these kind words:

“The next version of Zenoss (2.1) which is in beta, is looking very cool. Its integration with Google maps is excellent. For some time now this product has been, in my opinion, the single best open source NMS there is, period! Hope over to the site to take a look at the screenshots and the video they have over there”

The nominations are now open for the SourceForge.Net 2007 Community Choice Awards. If you think that Zenoss is the Best Tool for Sys Admins, The Best New Project, or Best Technical Support or any of the categories we would be honored by your nominations.

Sharedbook, a Web 2.0 reverse publishing company, has a very nice review of Zenoss Core.

“We’ve been running V1.1 on Debian Linux for about 5 weeks now and love it. As I said before this product is in active development, patch release V1.2 just came out last week and V2.0 (with some significant enhancements) just entered alpha.

If you’re in the market for a tool that will turn your shop from reactive to proactive this is certainly one to consider.”

Read the whole write-up on their corporate blog.

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.