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shuckins

All I want is Five Pieces of Feedback

Posted by shuckins on Mar 27, 2007 2:42:01 AM

Today was a big day here at Zenoss. We were the  recipient  of the  Slashdot effect . Which is great because it allowed a lot of people find out about Zenoss which we think is one of the coolest things to happen to systems management in a long time. However, that's not good enough for me, what I really want to hear about is how people are using Zenoss and how we could make Zenoss better. Nothing's cooler to me to hear how people all over the world are using something written by a bunch of goofy guys in Annapolis,MD .

 

So as I am grateful for the 10,000 or downloads we got today I would be just as happy with  Five Pieces of Feedback . In the time that I started righting this post,  Buanzo dropped me a line to tell me that Zenoss runs on Gentoo without any problems. Awesome! I have been a Gentoo fan since way back in the day when Daniel Robbins started the project. What other Linux distributions or platforms are you guys running Zenoss on?

 

That's one, now I need four more before I hit the sack tonight. You see I can tell you why I think why Zenoss is great, I can even tell you some places I would like to see us improve. However, it means a lot more coming from people using our stuff every day, so post a comment to this blog entry or send me an email at mrhinkle(at)zenoss.com and let me know what you think.

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Comments (10)
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Tengwar  says:

Well I haven't been able to use Zenoss yet but here are my thoughts on trying to use it.  Let me give you some background.  My company is in the early stages of looking for a server/network/services monitoring software and I would like to get some open source in here.  So I do some research and find a few recommendations and first on my list was Zenoss.  First step was to read through the documentation and then install it on a VPS account to start with.  Here are my thoughts on this.

 

1.  First I don't think the documentation is all that great.  Maybe for Linux experts its fine but some relative noobs it just doesn't go into enough details.

 

2.  I am having a very difficult time finding finding out the requirements to actually run this thing!  Also what type of resources will I need if I'm going to monitor 100 or 1000 items?

 

3.  Doesn't seem that any consideration was given to the fact that some people out there may not be installing this on a standalone server!  I've been able to install other monitoring software on a reseller account and others on a VPS! 

 

4.  No installer?  You're kidding right?

 

5.  Support Forums seem to be pretty empty and hard to actually get support from.
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Kenny Backus  says:

I'm looking into Zenoss as a network monitoring solution. I have spent about a month using Nagios and Groundwork Monitor, but determined that the design of Nagios is terrible (both the interface and configuration options are amazingly redundant and, for lack of a better word, 'dirty') and Groundwork (as well as lots of other nagios-based monitoring apps) is awkward and has even worse interface design. I hope Zenoss makes more sense and, heaven forbid, give admins a way of changing configuration variables through a web interface.

 

I'm going through the install and, although I have no problems following the instructions, I wonder why setting up the zenoss user and its environment variables, etc., can't just be automated.

 

Is there a particular security reason for running python, etc. as the zenoss user rather than root? This is a minor annoyance (mainly because it's inconsistent with what I'm used to) but if there are real reasons for it I have no problem doing it.

 

Also, just a nitpick, but the install script asks for the MySQL root password in plaintext: it should really be shadowed. You might even want to avoid this step and ask the user to set up a zenoss user and database table themselves; they're used to it.

Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Chris Leonardos  says:

I've been using Zenoss for a while to monitor about 10-15 devices.  I have used Nagios, OpenNMS, Spectrum, HPOV, BMC, and Netcool.

 

I know there were/are plans to build dependencies into the object monitoring.  I think this is really important to prevent spurious messages, and to help identify the exact location of an outage quickly

 

I would like to see a lot more documentation on how to extend the functionality of the product, and add custom modules.  Nagios plugin support is nice, but I think it's really for backwards? compatibility.

 

What would make this product really kick-ass, and what would I pay for as a "module" upgrade to Zenoss Core?  IP ADDRESS MANAGEMENT:

 

Autodiscovery of hosts on a subnet.  Ability to allocate blocks of addresses to OU's and have them managed at the host level by LAN administrators, not me.  Subnet Calc (Obviously).  Ability to retrieve Subnet and Host Information from AD.  AND, last but not least, the ability to automagically populate a WHOIS Server with the location, contact, and other information for each block of addresses.

 

We  have several public /16 addresses, and a global network.  Although we are only responsible for monitoring a very small piece of it, we are responsible for maintaining all the ip addressing.  iCK.

 

The ability to authenticate and assign user "group" membership via RADIUS would be extremely helpful to implement 2-factor auth.  Alarm sounds that go off when an alarm occurs for a NOC. 

 

Having WHOIS is a dream I've maintained since I took over managing the IP addressing in Excel Spreadsheets 5 years ago.  For network security and IDS it would be indispensible.  I don't have time to write my own tool.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

-Chris
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Scott  says:

Well, I'm trying to use it, but have not been able to get it running on FC6. Hangs trying to initialize zope db objects. Log files say it cant connect to 'localhost' '8100'. Tried everything I've read on support pages but no luck. I'm now installing from svn to see if anything there fixes it.

 

-Scott
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Phil John  says:

Just installed on an internal machine and have started setting it up to monitor 18 of our servers and a few internal machines.

 

So far everything is pretty easy to get started with, the only thing I could nitpick on would be the lack of device templates, especially when it comes to routers.

 

Apart from that it's a nice product that definitely gives everything else out there a run for its money.
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Martijn Goudkamp  says:

I found out about Zenoss thru tweakers.net, the biggest Dutch IT site.

I'm running Zenoss on my Mac, using VMware's Fusion and the VMware image from the download section: it's working great! Maybe you could link the Mac version of VMware in you download section (yes, it's still beta but working fine).

It works well with our Sonicwall firewalls but a Netgear firewall is not really supported, that's fine: I can still monitor the throughput.

I would like to have a page where I can see the actual throughput of selected devices, instead of going to each seperate OS page.

Anyway, THANK YOU!
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest timmy  says:

We'll trying to test this out in vmware, but not getting any inventory information.  I'm assuming its because the target is windows and I just have the windows snmp installed no snmp-informant or whatever so make it AGENTLESS with windows as well so we can just use the windows SNMP that's there
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Tony  says:

I've just completed installing Zenoss on Mac OS X Server now monitoring 50 devices (and about 200 more to go).  I had attempted to configure Nagios on FreeBSD, and gave up after it took me a couple of hours messing around with MIBS and other garbage just to get one switch added.  Blegh.

 

Zenoss took me 45 mintes to build (including dependencies) and 1 minute to get that switch added.

 

After I installed a couple of servers and events, I was surprised and delighted to find out how well it worked.  I was alerted to a service failure on our file server, fixed it and never had to lift a finger on Zenoss.  I hadn't even configured SMTP, but it looks like I don't have to now :).

 

Here's my top 3 list for zenoss:

 

1. Configurable Dashboard

    - Be able to post perf or os graphs for a few devices

    - /Location?

    - /Group?

 

2. Network Health Statistics (for all /Network devices)

 

3. Global Alerting Rules

 

But I have to say, this is a GREAT product.
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Jason W.  says:

So far Zenoss has been very interesting to us. We're attempting to select a replacement for our Nagios/Cacti config. At the moment, Zenoss seems to handle SNMP devices/traps pretty well. One thing that seems a bit cumbersome to configure is the poller for Nagios plugins. Its not really intuitive that Nagios plugins are under Perf. Also, it would be really nice if you could get a Christmas Tree display of all your services (Nagios plugins included) on a specified host, when they were checked last and when they are going to be checked next. Helps a lot if you're trying to figure out if a plug-in is running properly.

 

Going to try OpenNMS and see if we have any better luck with the poller, despite its apparent lack of real GUI config.
Sep 14, 2009 12:05 PM Guest Vishal Devgon  says:

I've started working on Zenoss Core. seems gud.

thanks for the great product

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