Noah Gift has a nice article on Net-SNMP and IPython on IBM Developerworks, he also mentions Zenoss. Here’s a quick synopsis of the article.

Most systems administrators have had some experience with Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), or at least have heard of it. If you are working in a data center, then you probably interact with SNMP, in some way, on a daily basis. There are many impressive, full-scale Network Management Systems (NMS) or Network Monitoring Systems that do notable SNMP monitoring, but this article is not about those systems. This article is about exploring SNMP through the Python™ language and writing the code yourself.

It’s a good article and nicely describes how Python can be an aid in SNMP monitoring. Noah’s also working on a book for O’Reilly called,”Python for Systems Administrators” which I am sure will be an aid to many Python and Zenoss enthusiasts.

Nobel winner blames cultural decline on “blogging and blugging”

Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing recently used her time on the nobel stage to state that “blogging and blugging”, in addition to the increase in the use of the internet and television is causing the cultural decline. In the first sense, I completely agree with her, people are beginning to use the internet to receive content, and turning away from print. However, the internet has widened the scope of authors and readers. Content is no longer held in the hands of the elite; the publishers no longer decide who gets published, and who gets sold. What is read is then dictated by those who read, and that which is written is no longer dictated by those who sell. While I think you might see a decrease in the total quality of all works published, you see a widening in perspectives and differing levels of digestion for everyone.

(From Mike)

Tags: blogging, cultural decline

The $100 iPhone/iPod Touch Stand Made from a Piece of Paper

We’ve got a fair amount of iPhones around the office, and what better way to show off your $400 phone than by showing how disposable your income is that you can use it as a stand for your iPhone!

(From Mike)

Tags: iphone, itouch, apple

Digging Deeper: Systems Management

Very interesting post, I think the thing that hits home is that there is the desire to combine the following into a single application. That’s one of the Zenoss key goals.

Monitoring makes us omni-present. It allows us to be constantly aware of change in our environment to which we should be aware and to record data points over a period of time to allow for trend analysis, capacity planning, and fault isolation down the road. Thus, we can divide monitoring applications into 2 categories:

• Data Collection & Reporting Applications. Examples: Cacti, MRTG
• Threshold & Conditional Alerting Applications: Examples: Nagios, Big Brother

(via John M. Willis)

Tags: Systems Management, open source, Nagios, Cacti, Big Brother

Hello Zenossians,

Welcome to the November edition of the Zenoss Newsletter. Here are the highlights for the month.

• Zenoss Enterprise 2.1 shipped on November 15th.
• The Zenoss community has been busy creating new ZenPacks. Check out our latest community contributions.
• Zenoss was featured on the cover of the November 12th issue of Information Week.
• Zenoss had a very successful exhibition at USENIX LISA. Thank you to those that stopped by and have become active in our community.

So without further ado, here’s the news that’s fit to print.

Zenoss Enterprise 2.1 Now Available

Zenoss Enterprise 2.1 is now available with powerful new features, extending both its application management and network management capabilities with virtualization support, native management of Java-based applications and first-of-its-kind network visualization features. Zenoss Enterprise 2.1 also adds powerful integration to popular 3rd party applications such as BMC’s Remedy Service Management, RANCID Network Management and LDAP.

Find out More About Zenoss Enterprise 2.1

Zenoss for Educational Users

The Zenoss team is pleased to announce the launch of Zenoss Enterprise Edition for Educational institutions. Through this program Zenoss is providing a state-of-the-art Open Source IT Management solution for today’s educational environments.

Learn about the Zenoss for EDU program

UTStarcom Monitors Fast Growing Infrastructure with Zenoss

Find out how why UT Starcom chose Zenoss Enterprise for their monitoring needs over other offerings. UT Starcom’s CIO says:

“Zenoss provided us an affordable IT management solution that was easy to use, open source with rich functionality, and that could effortlessly integrate with other internal applications.”

Zenoss Open Source Systems Management Survey

At this year’s USENIX LISA conference we polled attendees on their open source systems management usage. We received such a high response and valuable feedback that we would like to extend that same opportunity to participate to our user community. The complete survey results will be made available to our community.

Participate in the Zenoss Open Source Management Survey

Upcoming Events

• Zenoss Administrator Training Course – December 18-19 Annapolis, MD
• BarCampESM – January 18-20 Austin, TX

News

The November 12th issue of Information Week featured Zenoss in the cover story, Evaluating Tech Startups: Risks and Rewards. The article highlighted the reasons businesses might want to invest in technology developed by younger companies like Zenoss.

Read more…

• Information Week: Open Source Is Making A Name For Itself In Systems Management
• CBR Online: Big News for Open Source in IT Management

From the Blogosphere

• Network Computing Blog: Zenoss Adds New Enterprise Capabilities
• People over Process: An Open Source CMDB

As always thank you for your support.

Best Regards,
The Zenoss Team