This weekend we conducted our first Zenoss Community Day - February 20th at SCALE 7x and it was a big success from all accounts. Zenoss Client Services Engineer, Nathaniel McCallum and Zenoss Community Manager, Matt Ray, taught a full day class on how to deploy and monitor your network with Zenoss Core. We had a number of walk-ins and the class was standing room only for most of the day. Thank you for all that attended.

We also would like to thank the staff from SCALE who helped us secure the venue and promote the event. We had a great time at the expo and got to meet a lot of new Zenoss users and current Zenoss users monitoring everything from small networks at California schools to thousands of servers at some of the biggest web companies in the world.

Given the success of this event we are trying to secure a one day slot during the USENIX LISA conference in Baltimore and hopefully will have one other venue. (If you have suggestions please let us know by commenting on this post.)

We got a lot of positive feedback from the event and we will try to conduct at least two more events this year in conjunction with other technical conferences.

David Ennis sent us this nice note:

Kudos to all involved being the first time doing this. It was a great introduction to your product and I am anxious to get Zenoss installed here to give it a test drive. There is little I could suggest to change based on the venue and the format. The size of the group was good (not too big) and Nathaniel did a great job presenting the material.

For an introductory session it was excellent and I feel that I came away with a good understanding and primed to get it up and running. Short of making it a hands on encounter with Zenoss it was an excellent beginning. Nathaniel and Matt were prepared and knowledgeable and handled the material and questions very well.

Perhaps once I get to installing and using Zenoss I might have more input but for now I feel that I left equipped to jump in with both feet!

Again thanks for sponsoring the session and thanks to Matt and Nathaniel for a great job representing your product.

Joran Mills on his MobiusBlue Tech blog also had some very kind words:

Last week I attended a free Seminar for Zenoss. This was within the 2009 SCALA (sic) convention. The Zenoss Community Day was filled with fun and useful information for basic administration of Zenoss. Zenoss is another open source IT Management system. However Zenoss is built primarily on SNMP. SNMP, once configured on your host, allows for as much information as any of Nagios or Cacti perl scritps. SNMP is multi platform and is an industry standard for device management. I have posts below to install SNMP for windows and there is lots of documentation how to install Net-SNMP for you favorite linux brew.

Thanks again to everyone that attended Community Day and stopped by to say high at SCALE.