But having the tools to create ZenPacks doesn’t justify building your own ZenPack, similar to how having the ability to write applications doesn’t necessarily merit doing so.

So what steps do you need to take before building Dave his coveted Google TV ZenPack—or one specific to your business? Dave outlined several points, including the ones that follow.

1)  Identify a Business Objective

As team leader of Zenoss’ new ZaaS solution, Dave explained that his team built out an Amazon Elastic Search cluster for the backend of this new service. “So as soon as we built an Elastic Search cluster, we now had the responsibility to monitor [it],” Dave said.

That’s a pretty obvious business need. After all, if ZaaS lacked a way to monitor its backend, it would be useless (because if ZaaS can’t be bothered to monitor its goings-on, why would you feel compelled to subscribe to its monitoring tool?).

While your particular situation may not be as cut and dried as this example, your business could have a similar monitoring requirement that requires a ZenPack. Perhaps you’re archiving customer purchase histories on a MySQL database, and need the ability to access that database should one of those customers return to your e-commerce site. You’re going to want to know if, for whatever reason, a customer cannot access that information when making a new purchase.

2)  Figure Out What Type of Information Your ZenPack Must Obtain to Make it Valuable for Your Purpose 

After the ZaaS team was unable to find either an official or community Elastic Search ZenPack, Dave realized they would need to build the ZenPack for its ZaaS implementation. But Dave didn’t want his team just to start throwing things against the wall, hoping they might stick:

I didn’t want the guys just to blindly go in there and say, “We need to monitor one, two, three, four, and five,” say they’re done and then build the specs for a ZenPack in 15 minutes.

For one thing, you don’t want to collect data just because it’s available. You need to figure out what measurable data matter to your business objective. In explaining the importance of determining the right metrics for the Elastic Cloud cluster ZenPack, Dave pointed his people to an article titled Measuring What Matters: How To Pick A Good Metric. According to this post, a good metric should be:

• Comparative
• Understandable
• A ratio or rate that can show comparisons
• Something capable of changing behavior, based on those comparisons.

For example, your proposed ZenPack may be capable of telling you the maximum number of Python “tuples” processed per second. But, as Dave pointed out:

If I don’t know what a tuple is or what the significance is of how many it can process a second, then why would I monitor it [or] put a threshold on it? [Because I wouldn’t] know if the threshold at any level is valid [or] what to do if that threshold were exceeded.

So if you can’t answer questions like the ones above or can’t show whether your proposed measurement falls under the rubric of a “good metric,” you don’t need to muddy up your ZenPack with it.

3)  Design it so that it Collects Information in an Intelligible and Comprehensive Way

Dave stressed the importance of making sure your ZenPack operated in the way you expect it to operate. Because my coding experience is minimal, he described this in a way that I (and most non-techies) can understand:

It’s not just [whether] the server is up [or] the process is running [or] that it’s on the network. I expect my Elastic Search [ZenPack] to speak, say, English and French, so that when I test it by saying, “Hello, my name is Dave,” it responds by saying, “Hello, my name is Elastic Search 1,” or it will say whatever that equivalent of that is in French when I prompt it in French. So when I start throwing English at it, and it spits back Czechoslovakian, I know there’s a problem with my service. And most likely, if there’s a problem doing these synthetic tests, there will be a problem for my customer, [which] will result in events.

In other words, you want to build your ZenPack in a comprehensive way. Let me quote Dave again because he explains it better than I could:

You’re not just looking at availability. You’re looking at, “Are the lights on, are there people home, are they speaking English, so they know who I am?  Are they speaking English really slowly…[like they’re] on drugs or something?”  These things all need to be taken into consideration when you’re building it.

So often I find people have built ZenPacks…where they haven’t taken a complete view into account when they were spec’ing it. “The process is there. It must be working.” You’re full of yourself, but you’re going to get woken up at 4:00 AM by a customer…complaining that [a process] is responding but with rainbows instead of black and white, which is what you wanted.

4)  Always keep best practices in mind.

Dave didn’t go too deeply into best practices around building ZenPacks because “They’re well documented elsewhere.” But he again emphasized the need to map out your plans for a ZenPack:

It’s like looking at a house and saying, “The lights are on so everything must be okay,” but there’s no one in the house.  I want to know [if] there’s a mom, a dad, three kids, a dog, how much food does the dad eat, how much food does the mom eat, etc. It looks like a nice house, but I don’t know. Maybe the dog ate everyone.

Members of Dave’s team can expect him to drill them on aspects that pivot on the basic concept of “Did you think about this? Did you think about that?” But because Dave most likely isn’t your boss, here’s hoping you’ll internalize such thought patterns before you start coding away. While a dog is more likely to eat your homework than your family, it still makes good sense to make sure you know and understand a situation before it gets away from you.

“I just gave a demo of Zenoss Core to my supervisor and he liked what he saw.  He asked about the costs/merits of the commercial product versus the community version…I’d like to be able to give him a good ball park figure as well as what it gets us versus the free version.”

We get inquiries like this day-in and day-out:

• “What’s the difference between Zenoss Core and Zenoss Enterprise / Service Dynamics(SD)?”
• “Do you have any comparison of Zenoss Core to Zenoss (table of features, screenshoots …)”
• “Is there a Zenoss Core vs Zenoss Dynamics comparison? I mean  – a list of add-on features in Zenoss Service Dynamics?”

We also get requests to evaluate both products. We’re not surprised that you want to be thorough, but it’s twice the time and effort on your part – and we know you’ve got a limited supply of both. It’s your job to make the best match, in the shortest time possible, between your criteria and your available options.

So next Friday, we’re going to net out for you just how people are choosing between our two popular packages. It’s time for a brutally-honest discussion of Zenoss vs. Zenoss.

We’ve invited an impartial 3^rd-party expert – Shane Scott, from the ZenOSS Community Alliance– to walk you through a comparison, sharing the tribal knowledge he’s collected over years working with both the open-source product, Zenoss Core (aka the community version, the free version, etc.), and the commercial product, Zenoss Service Dynamics (aka the enterprise version, the commercial-of-the-shelf version, the paid version, etc.).

What: Zenoss vs. Zenoss – The Core vs. Commercial Throw Down
Date: Friday, May 17th
Time: 1:00 pm CST | 2:00 pm EST | 11:00 am PST
Who: Shane Scott - Global DC Infrastructure Zenoss Architecture at Rackspace, Jennifer Darrouzet - Director of Product Marketing at Zenoss, and Matt Maloney - Senior Technical Product Manager at Zenoss

It looks to be a lively discussion.  Matt Maloney, the Zenoss Service Dynamics (ZSD) Product Manager, will join us as well. Together, we’ll cover:

• The gear and applications you can monitor with each,
• Differences in capabilities, scalability, level of effort, and other criteria you’d be wise to consider when picking a monitoring solution your team will probably live with for a significant period of time,
• Plus live audience Q&A, such that YOU can exit the event with the details you need in order to avoid unnecessary homework in the future.

Altogether, we’re hoping to condense what might be weeks of research on your part into a single session of information exchange with the experts. All in support of your ability to make a recommendation that your colleagues will thank you for. Because analysis paralysis never serves anyone.

Here are some of the related questions we plan to answer in the session, too, and if you plan to join us, I’d encourage you to post questions below beforehand.

• Is paid support available for the Core version? What about paid training?
• I have the Core install complete but there may be a few commercial ZenPacks that I would like to purchase and install.
• What is the process to purchase commercial ZenPacks?
• Can we mix the Core and Enterprise editions, so we only use the Enterprise edition where we need the Enterprise functionality?

Hope to see you at the session on Friday, May 17^th!

But for those of you who have already read the Forrester Survey and know the benefits of converged infrastructure (among other things), jump to 37:45 because that is where, for me anyway, the webinar starts to get exciting. Kent starts this section by asking Dave to describe what you need to run Zenoss Service Dynamics, the company’s flagship product, on-premise. Then Kent asks Dave to contrast that with what you need to run ZaaS (Zenoss as a Service), which was introduced just a week ago. Dave’s team has been building this hosted version of ZSD over the last year to give potential customers what he called “a new consumption model…of the Zenoss we all know and love.”

Between you and me, I’m perplexed by this under-the-radar launch of ZaaS. I’ve always been onboard with Zenoss’ unified monitoring approach because I’ve interviewed too many frustrated IT people over my 15 years of covering enterprise technology. But I had been skeptical about the on-premise version of ZSD being a realistic solution either for mid-market companies with limited resources or for newer companies that may have built most, if not all, of their infrastructure in a private or public cloud. Why would these companies use any sort of on-premise solution, even one as useful as Zenoss?

They buried the lead

Because ZaaS’s introduction got a bit buried in the webinar, let me bring you back to Deepak’s exuberant post ZaaS What I’m Talking About!, where he stresses ZaaS is not simply a “Lite” version of ZSD:

Vendors, in their bid to be early entrants, have brought to market dumbed-down and often highly diluted versions of their flagship products. While quick to deploy, the capabilities of these solutions have left a lot to be desired…

We believe that the robustness of the solution should not be compromised, regardless of the consumption model…and that was the thinking behind offering Zenoss Service Dynamics as a Service. Zenoss as a Service–“ZaaS” as we like to call it–allows customers to take advantage of the advanced capabilities found in our on-premise solution, without owning the process of deployment, support or management. For some, a hosted solution could mean the difference between deploying unified monitoring and sticking with sub-optimal monitoring.

Even the patent-pending Service Impact capabilities are available as a service, meaning you start troubleshooting any infrastructure issue with a rank-ordered triage list. The one thing Kent and the team said isn’t currently available with ZaaS is the “Big Data”-style Analytics module – typically used by larger enterprises for quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year capacity forecasting. But those organizations probably have considerable IT staffing who manage a lot of on-premise tools.

In my follow-up with Deepak post-webinar, he did share one other point you may want to consider when weighing your options. As is the case with most SaaS services, ZaaS does store monitoring data in the cloud. If that’s against your policies, no ZaaS for you!

But those of you who are already relying on cloud-based infrastructures or hybrid infrastructures have another option now. Even if you have just one person handling your IT, you want assurance that everything is online and responsive to your customer or end-user needs just like the big guys. And because your business isn’t “too big to fail,” even the mildest glitch can cripple it.

Which is why ZaaS really is a big deal. It’s akin to what Salesforce.com achieved a decade ago. Before Salesforce.com and other SaaS services came to market, you could either install cumbersome CRM applications from big vendors like PeopleSoft and Siebel (remember them?) or you made do with some jury-rigged mashup of Microsoft Outlook and Excel. Similarly with ZaaS, you no longer have to put your hopes into a mishmash of monitoring tools that lack even common frames of reference.

The Joy of ZaaS

During the webinar, Dave explained that ZaaS is deployed in the cloud and works with your infrastructure through a secure connection to an on-premise virtual “collector” that is installed into your hypervisor:

[This collector does] all the unified monitoring that ZSD does, be it SNMP-based, SSH-based, or specific API-based, [along with] log collection and analysis. You can still run the gamut of ZenPacks and [take advantage of] the extensibility of Zenoss, scalable through multiple collectors, but the back-end administration and troubleshooting is being handled by us, the manufacturer, in a well-designed, formally maintained environment.

What does Dave mean when he says “handled by us?” Here’s a partial list:

• Initial Deployment
• Management
• Maintenance (including patches and upgrades)
• Infrastructure support
• Tech support
• Disaster recovery
• ZaaS application health (which includes a 99.9% uptime SLA)

Dave said the motivation behind building ZaaS was this:

Zenoss is taking on the responsibility of providing you, the customer, with a clean stable system you don’t have to worry about. We’re relieving this burden so that you can just use Zenoss.

All I could think in that moment was, Yes!

Zenoss’ best quality is its attention to simplicity. It’s about the hardest thing to achieve in any domain, be it writing, music, or software development. The fact that the company has built and continues to develop a unified monitoring solution “from the ground up” that can monitor most anything in a data center is ground-breaking in its own right. But providing a version most any organization can use, will, at the very least, change the way we do business going forward – at least in my modest opinion…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ComYDr2uwiE

Photo Credit: Crystian Cruz via Compfight cc

Going back through the blog, you can see that we’re no strangers to talking about DevOps. There are many reasons for this. As a software company focused on systems management, we epitomize DevOps at least in the literal semantic sense. More realistically, as we’ve built Zenoss to be the best system for monitoring a wide variety of resources from routers to firewalls to load balancers to storage to servers to applications, we’re very often pressed hard against the walls that exist between departments in large organizations.

Zenoss works best when shared. Due to the normal departmental firewalls and battles most of us have grown accustomed to over the years, we have our share of users who are using Zenoss just for monitoring routers, just servers, just VMware or something along those lines. That’s great by itself, and an even better start to something more, but the value only grows when all of the resources can be monitored together. As the meme goes, “monitor all of the things!”

Where this “best when shared” philosophy is true with Zenoss Core, it’s even more important for our customers with Service Impact. In this case, Zenoss can use a holistic view of all of your infrastructure to automatically discover dependencies and provide accurate root cause and service impact analysis when things go wrong, or just when things are in danger of going wrong.

So the DevOps philosophy of breaking down barriers, eliminating silos, getting everyone on the same page and singing Kumbaya, is music to our ears. We’ve been trying to crack that nut for years.

John Willis provided a great kick-off to the conference, and I feel like it set the tone very well for most of the talks during the two days. Back in 2010 he wrapped up what he felt DevOps was about in CAMS: Culture, Automation, Measurement, Sharing. To me, this conference was very focused on the culture and less on the others. Over time, this seems to be the general trend in the DevOps movement with automation and measurement fading a bit mostly due to what appears to be tools fatigue.

Pete Cheslock followed with a talk directly related to what turned out to be the biggest trend for the conference. Simply put, everyone is hiring. If you’re looking for good DevOps talent like we are at Zenoss, good luck! If you have good DevOps talent, watch out! I stopped tracking it at some point, but I think everyone who had a moment on stage rolled out the hiring red carpet.

Pete’s talk focused on how to retain the people you have, because as he so eloquently put it, “hiring people sucks.” I believe he was the first to reference Gene Kim’s book, The Phoenix Project. However, it was a very frequent topic and from all accounts should be mandatory reading for anyone in the field. Gene was even there to give a well received talk and sign the book.

Pete’s talk boiled down key concepts in a short time. Take money off the table as much as possible. Monetary adjustments are a a short-term fix at best. Understand what really drives people: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Open source projects, unscheduled time, and conferences and other forms of continuing learning being some example ways to satisfy these drivers. The over-arching strategy should simply be to treat people like the adults they are.

I could go on about some of the other quality talks by Dominica DeGrandis, Gene Kim, Jeff Hackert and others, but my best advice is to watch what’s coming out of the DevOps movement and these folks specifically. All of this could be just a blip on the radar, or the beginning of something big.

Image Credit

1) What are ZenPacks? According to Dave, ZenPacks are plugins.

ZenPacks provide a plug-in architecture that allows community members to extend Zenoss’s functionality…ZenPacks are encapsulated in Python eggs and provide instrumentation and reports for monitored infrastructure components.

But the jargon here was so thick I had ignored the description, focusing instead on the clever use of “eggs” to describe packages in Python (talk about grade school). Thankfully Dave supplied me with an analogy I could relate to:

People use Chrome [or] Safari, and when they want to have cool little widgets or little tools inside the browser, then they go to…the browser extension store or the plugin store and say “Yeah, I want this screenshot plugin or Evernote plugin or this other plugin.” ZenPacks are the same thing. They extend the core functionality of Zenoss.

2) What differentiates ZenPacks from plugins used by competing solutions? For a minute I thought Zenoss was unique in offering ZenPacks, but Dave quickly corrected that notion. Just like browsers, most monitoring systems have plugins of some type. “It’s a ‘me-too’ with our competitors,” he told me. Yet when Dave headed the Managed Services practice at Cisco partner Presidio, he chose Zenoss back in 2008. ZenPacks were a key reason:

I wanted to build my managed services platform on [Zenoss because] creating my own ZenPacks, creating my own plugins, was a much more flexible process, something that a user could do versus just waiting for the manufacturer to come out with a new plugin.

Dave went on to explain that competing solutions didn’t offer the same freedom to create a plugin to monitor, say, Google TV. In many cases, you would need to wait for the vendor to supply that plugin, which could take months if it happened at all, and then hoping your manager would sign off on buying it for you:

If I was like, “Hey, I really want to monitor my Google TV that I have sitting in my office [to] know when it’s on or off,”…I could just hack myself out a ZenPack that monitors the Google TV [versus having to] call my account manager [and find out] if it’s on the roadmap or not…or he’s going to quote me how much it’s going to cost for them to write it and I’m going to have to wait six months for it. There’s none of that with ZenPacks. ZenPacks, if you want it, you go write it yourself and integrate it into the product.

So ZenPacks give the developers the freedom to “hack out” a solution to monitoring that Google TV without having to involve non-technical colleagues in the organization for approval — people who would rather focus on the end result of what a technology offers the business, rather than on the minutia of the technology itself. And this aspect certainly aligns with one of the most recited mantras of running any sort of dynamic infrastructure, orient technology to business goals.

3) How does the open source community make ZenPacks so flexible and powerful? As we discussed in question 1, you don’t necessarily need to hack out your own ZenPack. In many cases, you can find the ZenPack of your dreams on the ZenPack Wiki. Even though Dave’s group could write its own Google TV ZenPack, he could potentially find one, if not several, through the Zenoss community:

I can find out…three different people have written three different ZenPacks having to do with my Google TV. I’m going to test all three of them [and] figure out which one most closely approximates my need…Maybe I’m even going to take that one and extend that one, build on somebody else’s work. That’s the value of ZenPacks, not the fact that they exist but the fact that they’re so extensible and that there’s an open source community out there where, if you’re not really the best programmer in the world, you can have an idea, go see if someone else has had the idea, use it and maybe build on it and integrate it into your products.

And this open source advantage isn’t limited to what the Zenoss community offers. When Dave worked at Presidio, his group often viewed their ZenPacks as valuable intellectual property (IP) they chose to keep “close to the vest:”

Our [ZenPacks] were all around usually Cisco’s Unified Communications, and we thought we were the best at Cisco [UC]…We used them to be competitive in our business…We weren’t saying, “Hey, I use Zenoss, and this other competitor uses Zenoss; therefore, we have equal capability because we’re both using the same manufacturer supply of ZenPack.” No, my ZenPack is custom. It’s better than your ZenPack.

Um, you can’t do even a fraction of these things using proprietary plugins. And although I admit I’ve probably drunk the open-source Kool Aid, the fact that ZenPacks (let alone Zenoss itself) are based on open source enables them to solve whatever monitoring challenges you may face on a granular level.

So what’s my conclusion from Part 1 of my interview with Dave?

Zenoss’ commitment to open source benefits you, no matter how you adopt (free vs. paid). You can download over 300 ZenPacks alone just on the Zenoss community page. You can modify those ZenPacks to fit your needs. You can create your own ZenPack that will integrate into your Zenoss installation because Zenoss and its open source community have developed standards and best practices you can follow. And depending on your business objectives, you can either share your ZenPacks with the Zenoss community or leverage them to your competitive advantage, another example of how Zenoss’ focus is on the ultimate value to your business, rather than its technology underpinnings. I hope this multi-part ZenPack primer will help you (and possibly your less technically-inclined colleagues) get a better handle on what ZenPacks are and what they offer. They’re all about getting you the capabilities you need, when you need them.

If you have a ZenPack question, please post it in the comments below. I’m happy to don my dunce cap and pose your questions to the experts – like Dave and his crew.

Participants will each present a 10 minute trick, tip, configuration, or some other interesting thing that can be done with Zenoss.  With a top prize of eternal bragging rights, an Apple Cinema Display, and no second prize the competition is sure to be fierce!

I’m upping the ante by publishing my hack ahead of time so my erstwhile competitors can see just what they’re up against.

In ten minutes, I’ll demonstrate three incredibly useful graph techniques. They’re available to every Zenoss user – open source or commercial – and demonstrate the value behind our open source platform.

Illustrate Availability

Our users start with one simple fact when they’re determining how IT is doing. Does the system even work?

Whether you’re planning new procedures to increase availability or trying to respond to a complaint, a picture is worth thousands of words and numbers.

Let this graph tell your story. “Over a six week period, we had only one brief outage.” Then move on to next steps. Bang, you’re productive again.

Really, this server isn’t “always down.”  See?

To see the details on how to accomplish this hack, see my detailed writeup in the Community Forum.

Make the Unusual Pop-out

There’s nothing harder than being told to figure out what’s wrong with a server you’ve never worked with before. How the heck can you be expected to look at a bunch of events and KPIs and spot what’s strange behavior and what’s normal?

What if we could enhance our KPI graphs to make the unusual pop out?

Can you spot a pattern here?

Yes, things really have changed recently.

Zenoss really goes to work here, putting statistical analysis right into the graph. Every point with a value more than 3 standard deviations out of line shows up in bright red, making it easy to spot patterns, changes, and random outliers.  By the way, three standard deviations is just about the top 1%.

To see the details on how to accomplish this hack, see my post in the Community Forums.

Predict the Future

Every quarter your boss wants to know what, where, and why you need to spend to keep up with changing demand. We need more than an eyeballed graph – we need a trend line!

With just a few simple commands, we can add a mathematically calculated least squares trend line to any graph and extend it as far as we want into the future.

CPU usage is rising, but we won’t run out soon.

Whether we’re looking at changing usage on a single server or a single network interface, or reviewing usage across all the servers supporting an application, trend lines make our job much easier.

A few ESX hosts may be overloaded, but I see where we can shift work around

Trend lines are the easiest form of capacity planning, and they’re free to all Zenoss  users!

To see the details on how to accomplish this hack see my post in the Community Forums.

Power of an Open Platform

We hear over and over from our customers that the single characteristic of the Zenoss product they most value is its extensible flexibility. Zenoss is easy to adapt to your specific needs, and I’m very happy to have been able to share a few simple techniques with you.

Now, off to convince my hacker competitors to share, too!

David Bainbridge, Principal Architect at Zenoss, is the man behind the photos. He’s been visiting Haiti working on various construction projects and helping in clinics. I reached out to him to hear about his work and rather than re-hash his email, I’m just going to paste it below:

I have been visiting Haiti off and on since 2 months after the 2010 earthquake. While here, I have worked on both construction projects as well as helping with medical clinics. The chicken coop in the picture is what I and a team of about 8 built in January. It is owned by an orphanage and was a means for the orphans to get protein via the eggs as well as some revenue – as they can sell the extra eggs. When fully stocked it will hold about 500 chickens.

This week I am participating in a medical trip. We brought with us some doctors from the US and also work with doctors and nursing students from Haiti. On Monday we served 182 people and today we served 162 people. On both days the majority of people served were children, but also their parents and other adults. As we are working with nursing students, our work here also helps train local people to help.

Anyway, I am a proud Zen-ite -  happy to be serving in Haiti.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I do blog about the experiences on mission-quest.blogspot.com and you can see blog posts from other team members on chickenrunhaiti.blogspot.com and medmiracles.blogspot.com.

Mahalo,
David

We’re thrilled to support one of our own giving back like this and hopefully Zenny has been a welcomed guest on David’s journey. If you’d like to keep up with David, feel free to check out his personal blog here. Below are a few of the pictures from his trip.

Reluctance is understandable.  Vendors, in their bid to be early entrants, have brought to market dumbed-down and often highly-diluted versions of their flagship products. While quick to deploy, the capabilities of these solutions have left a lot to be desired. For those for whom a check mark will suffice, these might be viable options.  Strategic IT leaders  – who rightly view monitoring as a key part of their IT infrastructure – find this approach lacking.

Here at Zenoss, we believe that the robustness of the solution should not be compromised, regardless of the consumption model – on-premise or hosted. And that was the thinking behind offering Zenoss Service Dynamics as a Service. Zenoss Service Dynamics or Zenoss as a Service (ZaaS) as we like to call it, allows customers to take advantage of the advanced capabilities found in our on-premise solution, without owning the process of deployment, support or management. For some, a hosted solution could mean the difference between deploying unified monitoring and sticking with sub-optimal monitoring.

Next week, we’ll be presenting analysis from a study by Forrester, regarding significant efficiencies one can gain – *if* you stop juggling 10+ tools (on average) to conduct your infrastructure monitoring. 98% of those who have reviewed the findings said they’d recommend their peers review this research, too. And at the end of the presentation, we’ll be discuss the 2 methods you can now use to take advantage of Zenoss Service Dynamics capabilities, on-premise and Zenoss as a Service.

Zenoss Investigates: How to Optimize IT Operations for Datacenter Efficiency [Forrester Research]

What is ZaaS?

ZaaS is a SaaS, or hosted, version of the Zenoss Service Dynamics solution. It delivers advanced service assurance capabilities to your physical, cloud and hybrid environment that enables you to reduce incidents, prioritize & expedite problem resolution, and minimize downtime.

ZaaS delivers two key capabilities, Resource Management, that enables unified monitoring across your disparate environment, and Service Impact Management, that maintains real-time information on service-asset dependencies and relationships. Then, through a unique combination of holistic resource monitoring, root cause analysis, and identification of asset-service relationships & dependencies, Zaas helps you prevent disruptions, lower MTTR and deliver on your challenging SLAs. All this with the rapid time to value and the convenience of a SaaS solution and the assurance of a 99.9% or better availability! Deployment is a breeze; all you need is a low-footprint on-site virtual appliance that actively collects and transmits data to Zenoss over an encrypted line, and you are off to the races.

Some key benefits obtained via Zenoss as a Service include

• Provides advanced service assurance capabilities without the complexity, cost and overhead of multiple tools
• Helps prevent outages with pro-active alerts
• Helps reduce MTTR when an outage does occur, through its real-time service model based approach
• Includes a 99.9% SLA
• Accomplishes data collection through a low footprint onsite virtual appliance and all data transmission occurs over a secure, encrypted line

If you are seeking to reduce the number of your outages and the MTTR when outages do occur, then Zenoss as a Service might be the right solution for you. It brings you unparalleled monitoring and management capabilities with the simplicity and the cost of a single tool and convenience of a hosted solution. Click here to learn more about Zenoss Service Dynamics.

Please join us for a webcast on April 26, 2013 as we discuss findings of the Forrester study and discuss high impact ways to boost efficiency within your datacenter. We will discuss how inefficiencies driven by legacy point products are impacting your bottom-line to the tune of $100,000/hr. We will also discuss how Zenoss Service Dynamics and Zenoss as a Service (ZaaS) can bring rapid and tangible value to your datacenter.

When: Friday, April 26th (1pm CST)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtUCvnGKIqk

I would be remiss if I didn’t also send a shout-out to frequently-mentioned RackSpace here as well. Having multiple great options is what makes this industry unstoppable.

But this post is about what’s new for YOU with regard to AWS. It’s been a couple of years since Zenoss released our first free & open-source AWS ZenPack back in 2011, and now we’re back with version 2.0, including monitoring coverage for many more cool features that Amazon has added since then.

Why does this matter to the average coder, IT junkie, or CIO?

Because – if you’re reading this blog – chances are that you are “on the hook” for how any Amazon resources behave.

“But wait,” you may cry, “that’s not in my job description!” To which I’ll reply: “them’s the breaks.” This just goes with the “IT lifestyle” you’ve chosen (the one where you need to wear this t-shirt when you head home for Thanksgiving).  Trust me when I say that you’ll be getting the call when anyone even suspects they’ve done a tilt-and-whirl, whether or not you were included in the selection or deployment of Amazon resources.  Which is why monitoring these (or any) public cloud resources in the same, unified platform where you monitor your other physical, virtual, and private cloud resources is smart. And of course, we hope you’re using Zenoss Core (the free & open source monitoring platform) or Zenoss Service Dynamics (the commercial version) as your one tool to rule them all. Because we want you out their bringing drool-worthy apps to market, and not juggling 10+ monitoring tools like the “average” IT shop.

But what’s new in AWS ZenPack 2.0? And is it still free & open-source?

First off, YES to the last question. The new AWS ZenPack is available to anyone and everyone, still free & open-source. A big benefit of our commercial open-source business model is that we get to provide widely-applicable capabilities to the broad community, and then double-down on more sophisticated and scalable capabilities for our commercial clients. We succeed when you do – when you get big and strong and demand more from your infrastructure. So bring it! If your organization has any AWS resources at all, head on over and grab your free next-gen Amazon Web Services ZenPack today. (But come back and get the quick & easy 3-step instruction set at the bottom of this post. It’s a short primer on building elasticity and redundancy into your AWS infrastructure.)

The new stuff in the 2.0 version of the AWS ZenPack is as follows:

• You can now monitor multiple AWS accounts from a single Zenoss installation, which is very handy if you find your team has spun up several accounts for different departments like engineering, QA, production, etc.
• You can also monitor your isolated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources now, over a secure VPN connection.
• The ZenPack keeps track of associations between AWS resources, such as how instances depend on volumes, and which instances use which subnets (and not just as-designed, but as-in-practice, in real-time). This so beats trouble-shooting issues from memory, or from the last guy’s hastily-scribbled notes, while your management team second-guesses your cloud creds.
• You also get to see exactly which geographic regions and availability zones your AWS resources are in. This is important because, as Amazon  CTO Werner Vogels lectured his SXSW audience this year, it’s your job to architect your applications for resiliency.  He emphasized that AWS customers should take advantage of multiple availability zones: “We give you that – use it!”
• The ZenPack also accesses a combination of AWS EC2 and CloudWatch APIs. Developers of cool new custom applications will benefit especially, because what you are doing is new, unique, and different. What you need doesn’t exist already, can’t come “out of the box,” and perfect for the open & extensible nature of Zenoss. Through the CloudWatch APIs, Zenoss can consume *any* custom metrics you’ve defined. So Zenoss can incorporate your custom KPIs into its eventing console, graph thresholds,  and alerting/notification processes. Or you can take it one step further via integration into a ticketing systems like ServiceNow – all via one unified northbound interface.

And if you’re a commercial licensee, it gets even better.

Commercial licensees can now also use multiple remote collectors for Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Specific instances can be associated with specific collectors, according to the needs of your organization’s scale and business logic.

If you license our Service Impact tool, you can also automatically monitor the performance and availability of all applications that depend – in whole or in part – on any AWS resources.  So that when you face an issue that your (internal or external) customers will notice, you get to fix mode faster, with a software-determined root cause in hand. That way, you have the answer to the “is it us or is it them?” question a whole lot faster.

But even more important are the proactive measures you can take to prevent service interruptions in the first place (see below for a simple 3-step plan for building load-based elasticity into your application). Your favorite Service Impact maps (built automatically, see example below) will help your team identify gaps in your redundancy.

We hope you’ll let us know what you think of the new AWS ZenPack. If you’re betting your business on Amazon Web Services & owe your coworkers, boss, and backers the assurance they need that you’re good to go, just remember: there’s a ‘Pack for that!

Reference Materials

Zenoss How-to: Initiate Load-Based Elasticity for an EC2 Setup

The Service Impact graph here shows current health status of an application delivered via 2 availability zones.

The project moved ahead and within 6 weeks, our new addition was complete with not so much as a complaint from my wife or myself. If a building project that temporarily displaces a family can be described as a pleasant experience, then this was one. Toward the end of the project though, it occurred to me that we needed to do something about the yard. I had put that decision on the back burner. So I called a few landscapers who came over and gave me estimates and I was pretty shocked at how much it was going to cost to just restore the yard to its former state. Only problem was that we had exhausted the budget.

I finally found someone who was a part-time landscaper who agreed to do it on the cheap and just smooth over the bumps and plant new grass. I had learned from one of the other “professional” landscapers who came over that we really needed a complete overhaul of the whole yard with a properly graded slope built from the foundation out to the back of the yard. When I told him his price was way over our budget he replied “yeah, there’s never enough money left over for the landscaper.” I referred to this as “the landscaper’s lament.”

Monitoring & Landscaping

So why is landscaping like monitoring? I have been in the enterprise software industry for 25+ years, a majority of that time spent in the monitoring and systems assurance market. I have spoken with 100’s of IT people at both large and small organizations in different industry segments, from financial services firms to manufacturing companies and government agencies. It is a given that organizations are always looking for an edge to either increase revenues or cut costs. The constant evolution of technology often provides that edge.

Committees form and projects are initiated to study how a particular solution can help a company achieve its business objectives. Vendors are solicited and references are checked and finally, after careful consideration and negotiation, a solution is selected. And then, the question is asked….”how are we going to monitor this new solution?” Typically, at this point, a rather frantic search begins for a monitoring tool that can provide the needed visibility into the health and welfare of the new solution. And just like my landscaping project, many times, the budget has been exhausted on the target solution and companies scramble to find a low-cost monitoring tool.

Sometimes, taking the approach of just trying to “make do” with existing tools and “jury rig” them to accommodate the new state of the art solution is the option to take. 15-20 years ago this approach probably worked even though it wasn’t optimal. Systems were, for the most part, static. Things didn’t change that much. If a problem occurred, IT people could often determine the cause based on their inherent knowledge of the components that made up the infrastructure. They kind of knew where everything was.

New Paradigm

With the advent of virtual computing and now cloud computing, it’s a whole new landscape (pun intended!). Resources are constantly changing, entering and exiting the environment in minutes. The allocation of technical infrastructure to support a business service is now increasingly in the hands of the end users who are starting to bypass IT.

However, the age old question still remains: “how are we going to know what’s going on so we can make sure the company’s life blood (mission critical applications) are performing as expected?” Because we all know what happens when something breaks, IT is usually the fall guy. Don’t get caught in the landscaper’s lament. Make sure that you talk to your landscaper up-front and put monitoring into your overall plan rather than be a budget omitted afterthought.

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