Squidoo , is a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. In other word's it's a way to recommend something to other readers and searchers on the web. One of our users,  Mike Badger , has created two lenses that mention Zenoss.

      Zenoss Lense -  http://www.squidoo.com/zenoss/

      Open Source Monitoring -  http://www.squidoo.com/monitoring/

This is very cool as the name lense implies it helps bring something into focus. Do you have an aspect to highlight about Zenoss or open source monitoring? Create a  lense and let us know.

Just another reminder, your chance to win a t-shirt has been extended. We still need your input for the Zenoss Community Survey, and to help make it a little more attractive I am extending the offer for more free Zenoss swag. The next 20 respondents to the survey will receive a Zenoss No Node Left Behind t-shirt.

But don’t do it just for the free t-shirt, your participation will help us continue to improve Zenoss Core and make it the best open source monitoring platform possible. Oh, and if you want to see the shirts, here they are:

Best Regards,

Mark “the community dude” Hinkle

Nathan, has a nice tidbit on running Zenoss over SSL on his blog:

Since Zenoss runs inside of Zope, you have to do a couple of things to get it to run over ssl. There are zope plugins, and perhaps there is another way that Zenoss would recommend, but I have never been one for reading when I can stomp full speed ahead

Does anyone else have Zenoss running over SSL? If so, what’s your recipe?

Harper Mann, points out this Gartner report, about pressures being exerted on the Big 4 Systems Management Vendors by the likes of Zenoss and other open source vendors.

“The report notes that while support was still one of the major impediments to OSM adoption, GroundWork Open Source, Zenoss, and Hyperic offer packages of management functionality along with maintenance agreements. The report also discusses the dissatisfaction of “Big 4″ customers with the interoperability (or lack thereof) of their proprietary tools, functionality that is inherent to GroundWork’s open source solution.”

This is something we believe strongly in, and it’s great to see even more validation from respected analysts firms like Gartner.

However, beyond all the corporate hype, what we really feel validates Zenoss Core, is our users who have been gushing with praise for Zenoss. To all of you, thanks.

[Read the Original post - IT Troubleshooter | InfoWorld | Gartner Jumps on the Bandwagon... | April 17, 2007 11:34 AM | By Harper Mann]

Congratulations to Rusty Wilson, our IT manager, for being named the first Zenoss Player of the Quarter. Rusty is the man. From working on migrating our website to Plone, to installing our Asterisk PR, updating SugarCRM and Zimbra, to mixing drinks at the company holiday party he’s done a great job this quarter.

Do you know what is the must-have fashion accessory of 2007? It’s not the rhinestone covered iPod case, it’s the Zenoss No Node Left Behind T-Shirt!

So how do you get one of these ultra cool bad boys? You participate in the Zenoss Community Survey.The first 100 respondents to the survey will receive a Zenoss No Node Left behind t-shirt. But that’s not all your participation will help us continue to improve Zenoss Core and make it the best open source monitoring platform possible.

Oh, and if you want to see the shirts, here they are:

Best Regards,

Mark “the community dude” Hinkle

I think it’s hilarious when I watch a movie where a person writes a message stuffs it in a bottle and someone finds it and responds to their request (e.g. send help). The odds against the bottle making it anywhere meaningful, let alone someone finding it and figuring out how to act on the request is staggering.

I find that Open Source software is a lot like the message in a bottle, the movie version. Good open source software spreads quickly. Through the miracle of web server logs you can watch referring URLs in your web logs or trackbacks in your blog. I never fail to be awed at how viral this is. The web overcomes geography and makes everything just a click away.

For example, I have been watching visitors to our web site over the last few months. Despite being located in a small town outside of Baltimore, MD in the US we have huge numbers of visitors from all over the world including Russia, the Netherlands, and China. We don’t speak Chinese, Dutch, or Russian. We don’t run advertisements in Moscow or buy billboards in Beijing. Through word of mouth Zenoss is carried on the currents of the Internet. Here’s a little view of our web visitors and downloaders from the last month.

Here are some examples of where our Zenoss message in a bottle has ended up in the last couple of weeks.

We showed up in the Netherlands on Tweakers.net and started an influx of downloads, questions, and users of Zenoss in the Netherlands. The same thing happened in China were our trusty friend Google Analytics shows us that Beijing is gaga about Zenoss.

And while I was happy to see our web visitors, what’s really exciting is the new users we have. Our friend Bob is the manager of network operations at one of the largest and most popular social networking sites and he’s currently piloting Zenoss Core. I also was interested to see Xaero from Managua, Nicaragua who’s trying out Zenoss with a couple of Fedora Core PCs. We also have fans like our friend James Governor, across the pond in Great Britain. Or Hubert Chen in Belmont,CA, USA.  And Brian Ray in Chi-town. Or Matteo, Andrea, Francesco, and Nicola in Italy.

Zenossians,

Welcome to our first official monthly newsletter for all things Zenoss.

One Year on Sourceforge.net

In this inaugural post, I’d like to reflect on our one-year anniversary on SourceForge.net. After four years in development we released Zenoss Core in February 2006 under the GNU Public License. After demonstrating the ability to successfully monitor tens of thousands of network devices we knew it was time to let Zenoss co-founder and CTO, Erik Dahl’s baby out into the wild, as a project on SourceForge.net.

While we were always confident that there would be strong interest in Zenoss Core, we are amazed at the adoption and recognition that has occurred since our first open source release. Here are some of the our accomplishments:

• Zenoss SourceForge.net Rank March 2006: 154,909
• Zenoss SourceForge.net Rank March 2007: 29
• Downloads in March 2006: 251
• Downloads in March 2007: 48,868
• Zenoss Rank among IT Monitoring Projects in 2007: 1
• SourceForge Project of the Month: March 2007

Thanks to all of you for taking interest and making this happen!!

While we have miles to go to achieve our mission of simplifying IT management, we are very happy with the progress. We are even more excited about what’s coming up in the coming months…

What’s New in 2007
It’s hard to believe that it’s already April, we have made so much progress that it’s hard to know where to begin. However, here are some of the highlights.

Zenoss 1.1 Released in January
Some of the key features from version 1.1 included:

• Automatic Remediation (i.e. execute a command based on an event)
• Configuration Change Tracking (i.e. automatically track history of configuration changes)
• User Interface Enhancements (e.g. Ajaxified performance graphs, etc.)
• Additional Reports & Report Export

>>> More

Updated Subscriptions & Support Services
As of April 1st , we have updated our commercial subscription packaging and pricing. Here is a quick summary of the key changes to our support and service offerings:

• New levels of service now packaged as Bronze, Silver and Gold
• Bronze support focused on users who want inexpensive access to Zenoss, Inc. engineers
• New indemnification and IP protection offerings

>>> More

Zenoss Community Site, Forums, Blog
In February we launched http://community.zenoss.com with some new features like user profiles and forums.   If you have not already, please registerat community.zenoss.com to gain post access to the forums and your own members area.

Also, the Zenoss Blog “No Node Left Behind” is active with posts several times per week, subscribe to our RSS feed today.

What’s Next
We are getting very close to our next major release of Zenoss Core, Version 2.0. We are moving quickly to 2.0 from 1.x because of major enhancements to both the user interface, configuration database, plugins architecture and collection engines. Here is a quick summary of what to expect in 2.0.

• Substantially Revamped AJAX User Interface
• Synthetic Web Transactions (beyond simple URL checks)
• SNMPv3 Support & Faster SNMP Collection
• ZenPacks – Ability to Package, Distribute and Load Zenoss Rules, Plugins & Extensions
• Expanded Configuration Database (CMDB) and Substantial Performance Improvements

Please visit our bug and features tracking database to provide your input for this upcoming version.

Thanks for your interest and support. Please keep telling us what you think we want to make managing your IT infrastructurre less hassle and more fun!

Best,

Bill Karpovich
CEO & Co-Founder
And the Zenoss Team

I can't count the number of times I've read about and responded to questions on zenoss-users regarding the Zenoss RPM and MySQL.  Here's a brief history if you've been one of the fortunate 5% of the community who has  not encountered this problem.

SuSE, CentOS/RHEL, and Fedora are all RPM based Linux distros.  Among the many roles of a Linux distribution maintainer is stability.  Distro maintainers customize the kernel, make patches to software to improve compatibility, and draw upon other "vanilla" source code and customize it based on whatever is the overarching strategy for the distro.  For CentOS/RHEL it's stability.  For Fedora it's access to the latest and greatest software that's been written.  I don't know what it is for SuSE (haven't really used it)...

When a distro maintainer produces an RPM of an open source software package, they give it a name and a list of dependencies that software requires.  This is where a problem has arisen with Zenoss: the various Linux distributors could not agree on a name for MySQL.

We're an OSS company trying to stay in business and that means that when a paying customer calls and asks for support it's really important to give them the support they need.  That's how we stay in business.  So when it comes down to supporting paying customers or spending a few days improving the build system to support native packages the choice is always the customer!  Of course we welcome anyone that wants to help us out in maintaining packages for various distros, but so far very few people have stepped forward.

The most practical thing we could do when we built the RPM for the first time was to define our dependency against the Vanilla MySQL RPM.  Although it's a pain in the neck it works - you can uninstall your native distro's MySQL RPM and install the Vanilla one from www.mysql.com.  Icky but better than no RPM at all...

All of that is going to change in the next release.  Yesterday I committed a series of changes to zenpkg as well as our spec file that allows us to easily create RPMs using the native distributor's MySQL package name.  If you're under FC6 you're going to get a zenoss RPM that Requires: mysql-server.  If you're under SuSE/SLES it'll be something different.

With this change you'll be able to use yum to install (hopefully) all of the dependencies Zenoss has, which will make installation a lot easier.  I'm anxiously awaiting the next release because I hate to see people turned off to Zenoss because the installation isn't as easy as it can be.  So it's very exciting to remove this roadblock.