Zenoss: A Quick, Easy and Inexpensive Monitoring Solution
You’ve got a network, email, servers, databases, applications, devices, and everything else running in your environment. Every day thousands of log entries are made, disk space usage grows, your routers and switches are busy doing their thing, and all of your end users are relying on the constant availability of all aspects of your system. The question is, how do you monitor it all so that you can proactively prevent problems rather than being stuck in a reactive mode?
Over the past year several of our customers have wanted to put a monitoring system in place for their network, servers, and applications, but didn’t have the time or money to implement one of the larger monitoring suites, such as Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager (also known as “SCOM”), HP’s OpenView, or IBM’s Tivoli. The solution: we rolled out a very nice open source monitoring solution called Zenoss.
Zenoss enables organizations to reap the benefits of a basic, highly functional, customizable enterprise-grade monitoring system – quickly, easily, and without busting the budget.
How Zenoss Works
Zenoss is a free web-based monitoring system that runs on a physical or virtual Linux or UNIX server and is managed through easy-to-use web-based consoles and dashboards. Administrators have the option of creating multiple dashboards, each designed to show a different set of information.
The Zenoss system can be set up and configuring in just a couple of days (vs. weeks or months for other programs). Zenoss compares favorably with the “monolithic” monitoring systems that cost millions of dollars, giving you the information you need to keep things up and running.
Some of Zenoss’ features include:
- Use of Auto-Discovery – Zenoss will automatically discover all of your system’s devices (routers, switches, and servers) and map out their relationships within your network. Once the initial discovery is made, you can set things up so that changes to your network are automatically discovered and logged, giving you an ongoing history and inventory of your network. If you prefer, device changes can also be entered manually.
- Creation of Role-Based Permissions – No need to give everyone full access. One person can be given permission to see only the network devices, for example, another can be given permission to see all of the monitoring data but not to act upon this information, while a few others might have full permission to access everything.
- Monitoring of All Types of Servers and Applications – Zenoss uses SNMP to monitor the availability of all your network devices, including Microsoft and Mac servers.
Is your email up and running? Are the POP or IMAP protocols working for your email accounts? Zenoss provides availability monitoring for Windows Services, Windows Processes, Linux Processes, URL availability, and standard TCP ports and services. This in turn enables you to monitor email availability for Exchange or Sendmail, web site or web page availability, and much more.
- Event and Log Management – With Zenoss you can create alerts based on particular Windows log or Syslog events, and event processing rules based on the occurrence of these particular events. So, for example, your system can be configured so that your IT manager receives an email every time a specific error code is logged. Or things can be set up so that if that error code is logged, the affected process or service is automatically restarted. The possibilities are endless.
- Performance Monitoring – Zenoss will monitor your system’s performance – looking at processor utilization, disk space, memory use, etc., – and generate events based on your chosen thresholds (or multiple thresholds). So, for example, you can receive an alert if your processor hits 85%, and then another alert if it hits 95%. In addition, because Zenoss retains all of this performance-related data over time, you have the option of graphing performance trends. This is very helpful when planning for your organization’s future needs.
- Works with Other Monitoring Systems – Many companies implement Zenoss when they already have a significant investment in monitoring software, but don’t want to invest yet more money at the level needed to expand the existing system. Open source Zenoss allows you to add new servers and keep them monitored, at far less cost than expanding the existing system. Depending on what’s being monitored, Zenoss can cover 80-100% of the existing monitoring capability, at 20% of the cost.
When to Use Zenoss
It is Coyote Creek’s experience that Zenoss works best in smaller environments. It is ideal for situations where money is an issue and a quick implementation time is needed.
In fact, Zenoss’ simplicity is an advantage. It’s far easier to deploy, maintain, and expand, at far less cost, than the “big iron” monitoring systems – and often gives a better result.
Plus, one of the sometimes-overlooked advantages of monitoring in general is that good monitoring reduces your people costs, because companies often need fewer people once they have monitoring “dialed in.”
How Coyote Creek Can Help
Anyone can download Zenoss and load it up onto their system. The challenge comes in the configuration. Exactly what should you monitor? What specific events should you be tracking? How do you want the alerts set up? Coyote Creek can help you with this and more. We’ve done a number of successful Zenoss implementations, and we can help you get this monitoring system up and running in your environment, too.
Give us a call. We’re here for you.
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