Here are the questions and answers from this week’s Getting Started With Zenoss session. These are a good source of information for those people starting to use Zenoss. If you would like to attend a future online training session you can reserve your spot today.

Q: How can we monitor from our site the connection between a NAS device at customer site and the offsite backup data center?

A: you could add the router at the offsite back up location to the ping class. if the router is not pingable, you will get an alert and you will know connection is down.

Q: How can we monitor a process on a customer’s Windows server which is connected to a monitored NAS ?

A: Windows process monitoring can be accomplished by SNMP. You must enable SNMP in windows. See the admin guide for “How to configure windows devices”.

Q: Does the Zenoss VMAppliance have the zenpack already installed?

A: the Zenoss VMware Appliance is the Zenoss CORE application only. The Zenoss Core-Zenpacks package must be installed separately. The appliance is a good choice if you have only  a windows machine available to test out Zenoss. If you have a CentOS, RHEL, or other supported Zenoss Core platform, I recommend you install on that.

Q: in the commercial version, are there any Linux distributions not supported?

A: almost any linux distro can be monitored – if net-snmmp is supported – we can likely monitor it, but each system needs to be tested. Some distributions can present issues due to the lack of a net-snmp binary and/or host resource MIB. If considering Zenoss Enterprise, please ask your sales contact about any specific distributions that you will need to monitor.

Q: Can a particular filesystem for a particular device be ignored for alerst (for example, drives which are naturally full)?

A: yes – there is zProperty called zFileSystemMapIgnoreNames in which you can specify a regex to ignore file systems. see admin guide for more info on zProperties. You can also use alerting rules and event transforms to further customize your alert strategy.

Q: How do you create a default location?

A: click on Locations (in left nav), click on “Down Arrow” beside the “Sub-Locations”, choose “Add New Organizer”

Q: Can I monitor voip on a cisco device?

A: In core, you can monitor syslog and trap events – which will give you some view of your VOIP. Monitoring VOIP may mean different things to different groups.  We monitor Cisco IP-SLA in Enterprise, which is a common way to measure VOIP related performance.

Q: Is there any differnce between sorting by “group” and sorting by “system” in regards to Zenoss features?

A: no difference from a feature perspective. These are simply “buckets” in which you can classify your devices. You can then use these “buckets” to help filter your alerting / event rules.

Q: is there a way to add a device manually? Without using the auto-detect feature?

A: Yes. You can choose the “Add Device” link from the left navigation menu. You can also choose add device from the page menu directly within the device class you want to put the device. And lastly, you can add without any modeling by simply setting the “protocol” to “none”.

Q: what is the difference between /Server/Linux and /Server/SSH/Linux?

A: /Server/Linux will perform SNMP based modeling and monitoring, /Server/SSH/Linux will use SSH connectivity to model and monitor your device. SNMP is by far the preferred method but SSH can be used when SNMP is not possible.

Q:  Is it possible to add any of the graphs for a device to the portlets?

There is a community zenpack that seems to accomplish this task. Please see http://zenpacks.zenoss.org/trac-zenpacks/ and look for “Show Graph Portlet” zenpack.

Q: Under the networks tab in my Zenoss install it auto-discovers many networks that are not actually in my environment that I do not want to monitor.  When I remove them they come back the next day.  Is there any way to stop that from happening?

A: Add a regex that matches them to zLocalIpAddresses. Any IP that is matched by this regex won’t create an entry in /Networks.