Zenoss will be exhibiting at LISA ‘08, the Large Installation System Administration Conference put together by USENIX in sunny San Diego. Please stop by our booth to learn more about Zenoss, ask questions and get a quick demo. While you’re there you can sign-up for a chance to win a Chumby and take our survey to possibly win an Asus EeePC. We’ll be sharing a demonstration of a Zenoss/Deki mashup we put together with our friends at MindTouch. Plus we’ll be co-hosting a Birds of a Feather session, Open Source for Large Enterprises. LISA is a great conference for system administrators and we look forward to seeing you there!

Tags: Community, conferences, deki, lisa, mashup, wiki, Zenoss

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

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

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

Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Tuesday, August 14 at 11am EST in the #zenoss IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (port 6667). Please drop in and bring your questions, answers, suggestions and feedback. See you there!

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-08-14-2008
other logs are available here:
http://www.zenoss.com/community/discuss/irc

Tags: Community, development, irc, Zenoss

We are very pleased to announce that the latest stable release of Zenoss, version 2.2.3 is now available for download. The Zenoss team has been hard at work nailing down defects (80+ closed!) and 2.2.3 should be one of our finest releases yet. While this is primarily a maintenance release, a lot of work has gone into testing and improving upgrades and installations.

2.2.3 Release Notes

Tickets closed for 2.2.3

Tags: release, Zenoss, zenoss core

This week Zenoss released our commercially supported Zenoss Enterprise Edition 2.2. We know many of you are already successfully using Zenoss Core or our enterprise products and we wanted to share our latest improvements largely informed by your feedback. We also invite you to test drive the new version and to explore these exciting new features:

Distributed Configuration Manager

• Several enhancements to our tiered architecture to simplify & secure the deployment of distributed collectors
• The Distributed Configuration Manager allows you to provision, configure and monitor distributed collectors directly from the Zenoss management GUI
• Scale to manage tens of thousands of resources through a point and click process

Distributed Collector Package

• Specialized software build, hardware appliance, and software appliance for distributed collectors
• Further simplifies deployment of distributed configurations

High Availability Package

• Standard, certified configuration to achieve high availability and real-time fail over for Zenoss deployment infrastructure
• Essential for mission critical management environments

Enhanced Monitoring of Microsoft Windows

• Several enhancements to agentless monitoring of Microsoft Windows
• In addition to monitoring Windows Performance Counters, users can now automatically populate and maintain a centralized view of their software, hardware and service configurations using WMI

Expanded Library of Certified Monitors

• New monitoring ZenPacks for BigIP, Brocade, Cisco (IPSLA, Load Balancers), Juniper, Netscreen (Firewalls), NetApp, Nortel, SugarCRM, etc.

Point-and-Click Installation

• New installers are available for certified platforms including Redhat Enterprise Linux, Novell Suse Enterprise Linux

Platinum Service Plan

• New service plan offers dedicated account management and 24×7 access to Zenoss Engineers for business critical issues

We hope that whether you use Zenoss Core or Enterprise you find each version an improvement on the last as we continue to strive to be the best open source systems management tool. Thank you for your support.

The new Zenoss 2.2 Core ZenPacks are now available for download and we’ve added a few new ones:

• DIG Monitor
• FTP Monitor
• HTTP Monitor
• IRCD Monitor
• Jabber Monitor
• LDAP Monitor
• NNTP Monitor
• NTP Monitor
• RPC Monitor

You can go to the ZenPack Project Site to see all the Community and Core ZenPacks currently available. If you prefer you can download the Core ZenPack Bundle for all the available Core ZenPacks.

Keep these things in mind for a happier ZenPack install or upgrade experience:

• New ZenPacks are distributed as Python .egg files, you may install them the same way you previously installed the .zip ZenPacks.
• If you installed Zenoss via a native rpm and want to use the ZenPacks RPM make sure you have read the instructions here: http://www.zenoss.com/community/docs/install-guides/zenoss-upgrade-instructions/
• Zenoss must be running when you attempt to install an individual ZenPack or the ZenPacks rpm. (Don’t attempt to install the Core RPM and the ZenPacks RPM at the same time!)
• If installing the individual ZenPacks remember to run zenpack –install as the zenoss user.
• If you are using a source-based installer for Zenoss make sure you have run zenmigrate since upgrading to 2.2 before installing ZenPacks.
• zenpack –list (as the zenoss user) will give you a list of installed ZenPacks and inform you if any are broken.
• If something goes awry, it may help to run zenmigrate manually (as the zenoss user.)
• Restart Zenoss after you have installed ZenPacks. (The ZenPacks rpm should restart Zenoss automatically.)
• If you have any problems or questions please post on the Zenoss ZenPacks forum and remember to detail in your post the platform you are installing on, which installation method you are using and whether you are performing a clean install or an upgrade.

Today we have a new Zenpacks area of the community site, if you recall we introduced Zenpacks in version 2.1. Zenpacks can change virtually any aspect of the Zenoss interface. We need your help to build, document, and help us, help you create the Zenpacks you want and need. We are working on documentation including a Zenpack developer’s guide but here’s a simple introduction on how to create and export a Zenpack  from the Zenoss GUI. We’ve also started a Zenpack forum where you can ask questions about Zenpacks or share your ideas with other Zenoss users.
If you are interested in contributing a Zenpack or have ideas on what would make a good Zenpack let us know.

The latest packaged version of Zenoss Core Beta for 2.1, Release 2.0.93, is available for download.

More information can be found here.

Zenoss Beta for 2.1 is available from: http://www.zenoss.com/download.

Zenoss Core 2.1 marks a significant update for many areas of Zenoss Core, including overall look and feel, back-end performance enhancements and added functionality. This beta release will have only critical bug fixes before the final release target of October 18th. Please help us out by testing aggressively!

Please report all issues you find with the release to the zenoss-users forum (http://community.zenoss.com/forums/) or to the mailing list (zenoss-users@zenoss.org) and please include the word “BETA” in the subject line.

The Zenoss 2.1 Beta release 2.0.93 includes a few enhancements as well as many minor fixes detailed below:

USER INTERFACE

• Event “pills” representing events that are entirely acknowledged are now grayed out. Also, we have added a tooltip to event pills specifying the number of acknowledged and unacknowledged events.
• Having a tough time aligning your dashboard portlets? No longer! Resizing of portlets now snaps to every 5 pixels. Moreover, all rows and headers inside a portlet have been made multiples-of-5 pixels high, so everything can be sized just right.
• Added a new dashboard portlet to display devices with a (configurable) list of production states.
• A fix to load Google Maps quicker is included in this release. Now, by setting the zDrawMapLinks zProperty to false, Google Maps can be told to ignore certain networks when calculating which links to draw. If Google Maps is slow for you, try setting that zProperty to false on any networks that do not span mappable Locations. If you don’t have any networks that span mappable Locations, set that zProperty to False at the root (/zport/dmd/Networks).
• Added blue dot image.
• Added grey event pills.
• Paging of the device list on the device organizer status screen has been restored.
• Repaired some address caching issues with Google Maps.
• The dashboard no longer leaks while refreshing (in Firefox; still leaking event listeners in IE). Also, it no longer flashes when updating portlet contents.
• Bad addresses no longer break Google Maps. (2077)
• Links on Google Maps can now be colors other than red and green. (2128)
• The event console now grows when new events come in. (1445)
• A bug wherein the event console would occasionally fail to display events has been rectified.(2058)
• Checkboxes on admin object page now clickable (r6942)

GRAPHING AND REPORTS

• Graphs without a y-axis label given an empty label so they align correctly with other graphs on page. (2118)
• Graph lineTypes, stacking and legends more appropriately migrated. (2130)
• Line and Area GraphPoints display the correct legend and stacking behavior when set to stack without a legend. (2131)
• Creating report organizers immediately under /Reports no longer gives error. (2132)
• Several graph related classes more resilient to being created with unusual ids. (2104)
• When editing a Collection a selection of multiple Devices and multiple components correctly adds the components and not the devices to the collection. (2113)
• Instances of several graph related classes can now be renamed where previously this caused an error. (2105)
• DataPoint GraphPoints are by default named after the datapoint id, not the datapoint’s combined datasource_datapoint name. (2130)
• The CSS class of some elements on MultiGraph Report pages have been changed to be consistent with rest of Zenoss. (2121)
• Removed sequence column from GraphDefinitions displayed on MultiGraph Report edit pages.
• Default sort columns correctly set on the MultipGraph Report edit page.
• Custom graph commands are now migrated to used the appropriate GraphPoint ids rather than datasource names.
• Improved reportmail, the Zenoss report to email converter

ZENDISC

• Add –subnets option to zendisc. Allows for recursive discover of subnetworks. (1843)
• Add –statusmonitor option to zendisc. Allows setting the default status monitor assigned to discovered devices. (2135)

ZENCOMMAND

• Fixed zencommand to gracefully handle malformed values. (2157)
• Added ApachePack and MySqlMonitor ZenPacks.

ZENPACKS

• OID Mapping and trap can now be added to ZenPack (2155)
• ProductClass can now be added to ZenPack (2154)
• Removed “Add to ZenPack” menu item from template components (2156)
• Adding object when URL has a template name in it, wouldn’t actually add object to ZenPack (2152)

OTHER FIXES

• Changes to pynetsnmp to improve stability.
• Configured a default encoding of latin-1 for python and Zope.
• Fixed “KeyError” stack traces to GUI caused by session timeouts
• Event views support “begins with” for Device and Event classes (2125)
• Sending a test page gave an error (2150)
• Device loader page didn’t check ids of new objects (2140)
• Fixed manage_addAdministrativeRole (2088)
• Fixed AttributeError on groupManager (2082)
• Check for illegal character in password (1461)
• zPropOverridden should have option to list overriding devices (2103)
• Split netmask and IP address on new route dialog (2099)

APPLIANCE

• Updated pynetsnmp to 0.26.8 on appliance (2144)
• Added sitecustomize package to appliance (2143)
• pydot libs removed (1962)
• Changed permission on Extensions and import directories in ZENHOME (2067)

Enjoy!

–Zenoss Dev Team