Best OSS Systems Mgmt App You Never Heard Of

FLOSSisnot4Teeth writes "You probably are familiar with Nagios and Webmin as two of the most widely deployed open source systems management applications. However, this month's SourceForge.net Project of the Month is probably a newcomer to open source systems and network administrators. Zenoss Core is a systems monitoring platform, released under GPL and over the last year it's become one of the most popular SF.net projects. Unlike most of these new "commercially backed" open source projects, Zenoss Core is the only version, their corporate sponsor doesn't offer a "pro version". Also their developers have been committing code back to other projects like RRDTool and Twisted. I have been playing around with Zenoss for about six months and have been totally impressed. Would be curious to see what other Slashdot readers think." SourceForge.net and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

Reminiscent of OpManager

[BinarySkies]

This seems a bit reminiscent of AdventNet's OpManager system. I would like to point out right now, though, that OpManager is about 700$ for a decent license that even compares to the kind of coverage you get from Zenoss. I wouldn't compare this app to Webmin so much; webmin controls only local system programs and some minimal enterprise software. This dives into the devices end of things as well, providing a decent number of MIBs. I'm very impressed by how the management console includes inventory on devices. Documentation seems decent, but then again I've been working with enterprise networking and systems management for several years. Even at that, this tool isn't demeaning to those who have prior experience. All and all a great OSS project and I look forward to seeing it continue to improve with time.

Re:Documentation

[PatMouser]

Take a look at http://www.zenoss.com/ [zenoss.com]. They just didn't link it in on the Source Forge site.

Re:Documentation

[nbannerman]

Sources for documentation from their main website;

http://zenoss.com/docs/zenwin [zenoss.com] - Windows documentation, rather brief. Supports 2003/XP apparently.
http://zenoss.com/docs [zenoss.com] - Main documentation website for Linux / BSD.

taken from greg haywoods blog

[Anonymous Coward]

Zenoss
Jan 26, 2007

I may have finally found the perfect monitor solution for my network: Zenoss. I have been using Nagios + Cacti + Smokeping for quite a while now. It works, but it's not integrated, and for many services, I'm running 2-3 checks. Running those every 5-10 minutes generates a tremendous amount of traffic (during the last 2 weeks, the monitor station has caused 20% of all traffic crossing the primary firewall!). The closest all-in-one I'd found previously was OpenNMS, which is so difficult to really understand and manage well, and so didn't fit my needs. I'd given some thought to rolling my own in Ruby, but just don't have the time for such an undertaking.

So while browsing the rPath/rBuilder site this morning, I discovered Zenoss. It's Zope-based, which I find a bit interesting. But from what I've seen in the 30 minutes I've had it running, the developers are right on with what I've been looking for. It has auto-discovery support, placing everything into a "/Discovered" group if it can't pick the right group on its own (the firewall was placed into the "/Network/Routers" group since it was part of the discovery chain). But it is smart enough to correlate different IPs to a single device, which OpenNMS can't do. It also supports Nagios plugins (though only via ssh and not nrpe), so I can leverage that investment while I evaluate the Zenoss way of checking.

There's also a built-in syslog catcher, so it can correlate log events to devices, which could be another huge time saver. And it has asset/inventory management so I don't need to keep that data separately either. What can't this puppy do?!

You can install from source or RPM, and there's a vmware image available too. It requires Python 2.3.5+ and MySQL 5.0.22+. Since I wanted to run on my Debian Sarge monitor station (which already has access to all the devices to manage), I had to upgrade the DB. Easy enough with the backports. The only trick I ran into there is that the install process requires port 8100 be available. You can change after install, but I couldn't find a way to change prior. The installer doesn't notice if the port is already in use, it just silently fails, and so when starting the Zope DB setup, it gets in a loop of printing "." (dots). Finally realized I had to shut down a Mongrel-run Rails app to get it going, and it worked perfectly. (Bug #933 has been filed.)

Stay tuned for more, as I will be playing with this ALOT over the next few weeks!

Re:Documentation

[bastion_xx]

Besides the python script to create a WMI monitor, zenoss does have good SNMP support - when you run the Informant http://www.wtcs.org/informant/ [wtcs.org] SNMP extensions.

Re:Beware of the JPEG

[morgan_greywolf]

It may very well be a good package, but until such time they use PNG for their screenshots, going through the tour involves squinting hard. Unfortunately no schooners appear, begging the question why JPEG was used to start with.

I'll ignore your blatant misuse of the phrase 'begging the question', but answer your specific question: JPEG was probably chosen because not all browsers support PNG -- especially true of older versions of IE -- but, they do all support JPEG.

Re:Here's what I think

[mabinogi]

Slashdot is for anything the Slashdot staff feel like approving.
It's not for satisfying anonymous cowards.

Re:Documentation

[bastion_xx]

Don't get me wrong, Nagios rocks and has been a godsend, even back in the netsaint era. Where Zenoss is useful is adding new devices for templates that already exist. In Nagios it's either change the underlying config files, pre-flight, and reload, or use a GUI to do the same.

Our use has transitioned from hand-crafted nagios plugins for bespoke services to more generic checks and longer term capacity planning. Zenoss can do this, and it appears with less operational management, allowing us to focus on performance data and more in-depth Windows monitors (again an internal change from Linux core systems to Windows -- different client base).

Isn't this a dupe?

[jkrise]

I can't understand why this isn't tagged dupe already... I seem to remember ZenOSS on /. a month or so ago... followed by an article on OpenNMS as well.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/23/003223 3 [slashdot.org]

I think Vista has broken most commercial network mgmnt offerings... nothing else can explain these dupes!

Re:Beware of the JPEG

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, that usage of "begs the question" has become prevalent enough that it probably can no longer be described as "blatently misuse".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begs_the_question#Mod ern_usage [wikipedia.org]

other contenders

[OriginalArlen]

As it happens I was just reading my locally saved copy of this related Slashdot piece, on OpenNMS [slashdot.org]. Other alternatives mentioned in the comments were:

• Cacti [cacti.net] (an RRDtool front-end -- if you don't know what RDDtool is, you don't need this :) )
• Munin [linpro.no], and
• OSSEC [ossec.net].

I've looked over someone's shoulder at the latter - it seems pretty good, it runs on SNMP - I tinkered with NAGIOS five years ago and found it good, but a little dangerous if you didn't read the docs before firing it up (back then, anyway, it auto-discovered the local network by strobing everything in sight with Nmap scans)... but I've no experience of any of these in production. I've been asked to build out a new office network, which will be a template for future local offices, and getting the monitoring right is going to be crucial, so any actual experience of production use gratefully received!

Re:$10K for 50 machines?

[firl]

Incase your wondering he said support, not purchase.

Re:ZABBIX

[zeenixus]

it's also not a huge gob of python like zenoss which requires at least 512 megs of ram to run and do something useful.

zabbix server and clients are written in C, with php for the web front-end. It has it's quirks and shortcomings, but I'll take simple and lightweight over bloaty probably-can't-scale-worth-a-damn any day.

Re:Beware of the JPEG

[Lord Ender]

That doesn't matter. If he wanted the 12 people still using IE4 to see his site, he could have used GIF.

Attention everyone: Lossy image compression, such as JPG, should NEVER EVER EVER be used for things with solid colors or high contrasts (especially text)! Use PNG, GIF, BMP, or any other losslessly/un-compressed format. JPG is only for "natural" images such as photographs!

Compressing text with lossy image compression is a sin almost as bad as butchering "beg the question." BOTH of these atrocities make the baby Jesus cry.