Zenoss Community: Message List - What do you want in King Crab?

Re: What do you want in King Crab?

community@zenoss.org — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:10:14 GMT

"mray" wrote:

Have you looked into assigning admins to admin groups and assigning
your devices to Groups and Systems? You can assign admins and admin
groups to watch alerts on Groups, Systems and Locations in addition to
the default alerts. These admins and admin groups attached to
Systems, Groups and Locations can also have independent maintenance
windows and alert schedules.

Thanks,
Matt Ray
Zenoss Community Manager
community.zenoss.com
mray@zenoss.com

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Thanks, Matt. I had not looked into those features.

About the maintenance schedules...

It looks like you can't reuse the same schedule definition in multiple alerts, true? Not a big deal, but it would be nice to define one maintenance window called maybe "sleepy time" and use that for all the alerts we don't want to know about at night.

Matt

What do you want in King Crab?

mray@zenoss.com — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:03:46 GMT

Better alerts management

community@zenoss.org — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:27:25 GMT

Request (in order of importance):

1) Be able to move alerts from user to user
2) Be able to rename alerts
3) Be able to copy an alert to a new alert so that I don't have to modify all of the parameters of the new alert.
4) More flexible Boolean rules. I want to have rules equivalent to: "device class beginning with x" and NOT "device class beginning with y". I don't want inflexibility in the alerting rules dictate a complete rethink of my device class hierarchy.
5) How about an alerts organizer hierarchy (like Devices classes) with inheritance? Really, any place you have the organizer hierarchy concept (Device classes, templates, etc.), you should automatically put in copying, moving, renaming, inheritance.

Background:

This 'per user' alerts management is good and not so good. We have a ticketing system that manages escalation and we have multiple Zenoss users (network/server admin types, management types). Our management systems (NNM and Zenoss) send emails to the ticketing system and we would like Zenoss to be more flexible and hierarchical. I don't want an alert that sends to the ticketing system tied to any active user's account. I want a Zenoss account that is only accessible by a few people and that account is the home of the 'standard' alerts that send to the ticketing system. But I don't want to have to develop all the alerts while logged into that user account. I want to be able to move alerts from my account to the 'ticketing' account that send alerts to the ticketing system. And I want any moves or any other alert changes to be logged and potentially put into an event.

Matt

Re: What I want for Zenoss

community@zenoss.org — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 21:51:20 GMT

I am probably a little late, but thought I would add a few thoughts.

One of the core issues I have with Zenoss is how it deals with SNMP Tables. To deal with them, I believe that two systems (and/or wizards) would need to be created:
* I would love to see table creation moved into templates or alternatively have a wizard to create them. You set up the base OID, the index for uniqueness, a name index to name the row, and any named value indexes that you want to monitor. 95% of the modelers that we have created are largely duplicates of each other (with the OIDs and names changed). Special formatting functions could be an additional step, but again seem like a doable thing. In the background Zenoss could then create a basic modeler or whatever it wants to do. If it did create a modeler, the author could then go in and tweak things as needed. If the results just lived in a template then any special cases could continue to be dealt with in the current manner. Multilevel indexes could be a problem with this so leaving them in the old method would work if you wanted to, but in the end they largely work similar to single index tables and could probably be added with minimal effort.
* The second part of this is a TAL include manager and table editor. The current way the TAL files work means that either you copy the files from the core Zenoss Installation to your Zenpack and tack on your tables every time you update the core system or add duplicate tabs to monitor the special tables which means you have to click back and forth if you want to compare tables. However, the modeled trees and relationships are all stored in the ZEO DB, so allow another wizard to create a table based on that data and then include it into the tab. Ideally the base skin file would just set up the framework and all of the current tables would be moved into includes that could then be added or removed based on whatever system works best.
If the above was designed properly, Arbitrary tables could also be added for monitoring non-unique non-hardware synthetic based templates (ie multiple databases on a single host, multiple web sites on different ips/ports as sergeymasushko requested, command based tests for special cases on a single host, etc.)

As fdeckert suggests, allow templates to be bound outside the Device tree via things like Groups, Systems, or Products. Which leads into more control over the Device tree. We all believe we know where a device belongs and as such we build ZenPacks that then map that belief. This often leads to duplicate trees that reflect how a device works in each of our environments and things like /Devices/Network/Cisco and /Devices/Network/Router/Cisco. Additionally, some of the issues of having a device with multible uses (the Apache and mysql example that fdeckert supplies) causes us to move templates up the device tree from where they most make sense to be in order to allow us to map the template down multiple branches. This creates a mess at the higher level branches of many templates for specific devices found farther down. There are many ways that this issue could probably be solved, but no matter which way it happens, it will necesitate more control over the way the Device tree is setup.

Timing at the template level rather than the collector level for all types of collectors would also be nice so that we can more closely monitor key devices and metrics and back off on the less important ones that may only be used for reporting or later analysis.

Of course, I also have to add to the layer 2 dependency request and ways to squash sympathetic events.

I think I should leave off for now as I know this is late coming to the table and I believe I have included far too much as it is.

Re: What I want for Zenoss

community@zenoss.org — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:10:44 GMT

"ZopeisDope" wrote:

I would really like to see some wizards, better and easier reporting, and of course better documentation and/or online how to videos. :D

I like this idea, like wizards or howto vids on to create alerts or how to do all the basic configuration to get zenoss monitoring

Florian your zenpack borked my Dashboard

community@zenoss.org — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:29:29 GMT

Hi Florian,

It seem that you report zenpack borked few people dashboard including mine, I dont know what's wrong.. can you check please?

http://forums.zenoss.com/viewtopic.php?t=9978

Thanks in advance.

"fdeckert" wrote:

@tbannister

We had the same issue with reports, so I finally wrote a portlet to let one add the reports he is the most interested in.

http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/reports

--
Florian Deckert
SopraGroup - France

Re: What do you want in King Crab?

community@zenoss.org — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:22:33 GMT

I guess I want some GUI desktop remote access integrated into Zenoss..
No worries James, just one of my dreams.. :wink:

"jmp242" wrote:

What does NX have to do with Zenoss / monitoring?
--
James Pulver
Information Technology Area Supervisor
LEPP Computer Group
Cornell University

zarxcky wrote, On 7/14/2009 5:08 AM:

Something like neatx client from Google or many other NX clients perhaps. So far that I know of is one proprietary software that offer this features is Innodium product called Innodesk. For Windows platform. And costs gazillion.

Handycafe (Cyber cafe management software) also have this kind of feature.

I can imagine logging into end-user Windows/FOSS platform to turn the desktop off to save electricity since the end-users forgot to turn it off before he/she goes home.

or perhaps.. get into the end user desktop and take control of the desktop since I caught them surfing porn during work-time.

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RE: Better Reports

community@zenoss.org — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:21:06 GMT

Better Reports

community@zenoss.org — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:34:36 GMT

Here's something that I think would improve the likely hood of Zenoss being accepted in a business environment and found useful by management types:

Move the current report section from "Browse By" to "Classes" and replace the current report section in "Browse By" with a report organizer similar to the Groups organizer. This way I can hide all the reports that my manager doesn't want to see and leave him with the half dozen that he actually cares about. Right now, he always gets "Custom Device Reports", "Device Reports", "Event Reports", "Graph Reports", "Multi-Graph Reports", "Performance Reports" and "User Reports", when he hits the "Reports" link and he's threatening to make me use Solarwinds instead.

Additionally, a dashboard application that lets the user pick a list reports would probably go over pretty well too.

Quoth my boss:

"I don't know what any of this stuff is, why can't I just see the reports I want?"

I know the reason is that the Report categories are actually report classes, but that seems to me all the more reason to move it to Classes and add an independant Report Browser segment.

What do you want in King Crab?

community@zenoss.org — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:08:49 GMT

2009/7/15 stephm <stephm@plateautel.com ([email]stephm@plateautel.com[/email])>

When we add devices we then have to go back to each and every device and rename it. I would LOVE to be able on Add Device to put in the Device IP, Device Class Path, and Device Name!!!

How are you adding devices? On my installation clicking "Add Device" in the main menu gives me a page in which I set Device Name (which is then resolved to its IP) and a field to set the Device Class Path, along with many other fields to fiddle with such as Location and System type.

--
Regards,

Graham Bloice