Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, February 4 at 11am EST in the #zenoss IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (port 6667). Please drop in and bring your questions, answers,  suggestions and feedback.  Zenoss Developer John Causey and  other developers will be available to answer your questions on Zenoss, discuss the on-going Zenoss  in the Clouds ZenPack Contest and the Zenoss 2.5.2 Beta RC - QA Test Day that will also be ongoing.

We’ll log the session and repost it here if you can’t make it.

Don’t forget you can search for answers to common  questions by visiting the Zenoss Forum.

UPDATE: IRC transcript Dev chat 02/04/2010

Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, January 7 at 11am EST in the #zenoss IRC channel on irc.freenode.net (port 6667). Please drop in and bring your questions, answers, suggestions and feedback.  Zenoss Architect Chip Holden and other developers will be available to answer your questions on Zenoss with aplomb, discuss the on-going Zenoss in the Clouds ZenPack Contest and any other events in the Zenoss Community.

We’ll log the session and repost it here if you can’t make it.

Don’t forget you can search for answers to common questions by visiting the Zenoss Forum.

UPDATE: Transcript is here: Dev chat 01/07/2010

As enterprise infrastructure continues to evolve and move into more virtual and non-local environments, Zenoss wants to help our users expand their monitoring of their networks, devices and the services that they depend on.  We've decided to help kickstart the creation of new ZenPacks for monitoring this evolving landscape with another Community ZenPack Contest, the "Zenoss in the Clouds ZenPack Contest" with not 1, but 5 great prizes!

What's  this ZenPack Contest About?

We're looking for users to develop ZenPacks that monitor cloud infrastructure and service providers, the tools for deploying and the technologies used there.  Here are a few suggested examples:

Infrastructure and Service Providers:

• Eucalyptus
• RackSpace Cloud
  
• Azure
• vCloud
• SalesForce
• Amazon SQS
  

Deployment and Cloud-based Technologies:

• Puppet
• Chef
• Drizzle
• Hadoop
• NoSQL databases
  

We’re looking for as many useful submissions as possible, monitoring something not yet covered, improvements to existing ZenPacks or extending Zenoss to provide new functionality.  It doesn’t have to be overly complex, but don’t let that stop you from going wild. There are a lot of ZenPacks that are being tested or have yet to been submitted to Zenoss for hosting, so this contest is your chance to show off your chops and possibly win a great prize.  To help foster the discussion we've created a new Zenoss-Cloud forum.

Developer Resources

These resources should help anyone looking to develop a ZenPack.  Feel free to contact community@zenoss.com with any questions you may have.

• Community ZenPacks
• Zenoss Community ZenPacks source
• Zenoss Core ZenPacks source
• Amazon Web Services ZenPack
  
• Zenoss Developer’s Guide
• Zenoss Extended Monitoring Guide
• ZenPack Development
  
• Creating Zenoss ZenPacks by Zenoss Master Jane Curry
• Zenoss-Cloud forum
• Zenoss-Zenpacks forum

The Prizes

To encourage  slightly more ambitious entries, we're raising the stakes a bit with some monetary bounties.

• The Grand Prize is $2000  for the best ZenPacks
• There will be 4 runner-up prizes of $500, 3 will be selected by the judges, 1 will be chosen randomly.
  

The Rules

The developers at Zenoss have used a variety of ways to configure their development environment. Several of us use the Eclipse IDE, but it take special consideration on using it effectively with the Zenoss source tree.

In a series of blog posts, I've described my personal Zenoss development environment and how it is configured.

In Part 1, I discuss how to initially check out Zenoss from source and get a working instance on either Mac OS X or Ubuntu.

In Part 2, I discuss how to install and configure Eclipse to use this checked out version of Zenoss.

And in Part 3, I discuss how I work with the Zenoss source for day-to-day activities using branch-based development.

This month's tip comes from Zenoss engineer Kells Kearney who recently checked in a patchset for ticket #5375 "Add tab completion to zendmd".  This was checked in for the upcoming 2.5 release, but it applies cleanly to recent 2.4.5 installations.  By Kells' description, this patch makes spelunking in zendmd become very easy and reduce some of the need for looking through code to determine what's possible.  To apply and use the patch

1. Login as the zenoss user and cd $ZENHOME
2. zenoss stop
3. zenpatch 14397
4. zenoss restart
5. zendmd
6. You can now hit the tab key and see all the possible choices when working with devices and other zodb objects.

For more tips on using zendmd, take a look at the Developer Guide and the ZenDMD section of the Community Wiki. 

Thanks Kells!

The Zenoss Summer of Community ZenPacks Contest  has ended and we're still evaluating the entries.  The number, quality and diversity were truly impressive!  We had a tremendous response, more than double  last year's contest !  There were over 50 entries, and the judges are going over them to pick out the Grand Prize Winner of the QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS  and the runner-up prizes of open source  Chumby  interactive media players.

There were a lot of really great entries, here is a quick rundown of all the ZenPacks entered into the contest:

NEW ZenPacks:

• AIX SNMP
• Bridge MIB
• Cisco MDS
• Dell M1000e Blade Center
• Dell Monitor
• Fedora Linux
• Gentoo Linux
• IP-SLA Enumeration/Monitoring
• Jabber/XMPP Bot
• Linux Monitor AddOn
• MGE UPS

• MS SQL ODBC Database Monitor

• MySQL ODBC Database Monitor
• NetApp Community
• NetWare SNMP
• Nortel Passport Switches
• Nortel Passport and Baystack MIBs
• ODBC Datasource
• OpenSolaris
• PostgreSQL ODBC Database Monitor
• Predictive Threshold
• RDBMS Monitoring
• Range Threshold
• Reports Portlet
• SuSE Linux
• TCP Performance
• UDP Performance
• Ubuntu Linux
• WBEM Data Source
• WBEM Linux Monitor
• WMI Data Source
• WMI Exchange 2003
• WMI Exchange 2003 Perf
• WMI IIS6 Performance
• WMI Terminal Server
• WMI Terminal Services
• WMI Windows Performance
• Windows SNMP Performance Monitor

UPDATED ZenPacks:

• Advanced Device Details
• Barracuda Spam Appliance
• Component Cleaner
• Event Views Portlet
• HP ProLiant Monitor
• Perfmon
• Point Threshold
• Sentry CDU
• SQL Server 2000/2005 Performance

For a complete list of all the Community ZenPacks that are available, please visit:  http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/

For Community ZenPack development and further information, please visit the  Community ZenPack Repository

Thanks again to everyone who contributed their ZenPacks to the Zenoss Community

Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, June 11 at 11am EDT (UTC -04:00) in the #zenoss IRC channel on  irc.freenode.net  (port 6667). Please drop in with your questions, answers, suggestions and feedback.  Bring your questions for our developers on the  Summer of ZenPacks Contest , SouthEast LinuxFest next weekend  or anything else you wish to talk about.

We’ll log the session and repost them IRC if you can’t make it.

Don’t forget you can search for answers to common questions by visiting the Forums.

UPDATE : The transcript is now available:  Zenoss IRC session 6/11/2009