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.

Litmus test - Failed

[Dareth]

You have searched for packages that names contain zenoss in all suites, all sections, and all architectures.

Can't find that package.

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It appears I am not yet interested.

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[phish]

Interesting how the submitter writes the post suggesting as if they're a user....

"I've been playing around with it for six months and have been totally impressed!"

Easy to be impressed by your own products, isn't it?

Re:Another litmus test

[Jason Earl]

I am as big a PostgreSQL bigot as you are likely to find, but I don't see the problem with using MySQL for storing monitoring data. I mean seriously, why should I care if the application stores the fact that my servers still respond to pings in a transaction safe manner? Nagios, which I currently use, stores this information in flat text files.

Re:Reminiscent of OpManager

[ahodgson]

What you're looking for is called a system administrator. Any server on the Internet requires one. Either you're willing to spend the time to learn how to be that person, or you should be paying someone else to do it. There is no piece of software that can do it for you. Believing there is will result in downtime and, sooner or later, someone hacking your server.

Re:Nice looking, but not enough to meet my needs.

[ErnieD]

If you don't already have all of the monitoring hardware in place, check out the NetBotz (now owned by APC) suite of monitoring products. You buy one rack-mount system, and can tie any number of sensor "pods" (or even third-party sensors via customizable input contacts), and all sensors report back to the main unit for logging and alerting. It can also forward the SNMP traps onto an existing network monitoring system if you have one.

I don't believe they'll monitor UPS equipment however. For that, here at my company we use the APC InfraStruXure (ISX) manager appliance, since all of our power equipment is APC. It's a nice little 1U rackmount that manages all APC devices you point it at, and it's a central point for management and monitoring/alerting. APC also has their own APC-branded (not NetBotz) line of environmental monitors which also have customizable input & output contacts, and they can be managed by the ISX manager appliance along with the power equipment.

If you do already have a variety of monitoring sensors, if they can communicate to the network, then presumably they can send SNMP traps? You could have those sent to any central SNMP monitoring system (like Zenoss) to have it actually send out the alerts.