Zenoss Blog http://blog.zenoss.com No Node Left Behind Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:11:46 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7.1 en hourly 1 ZenossBloghttp://feedburner.google.com Zenoss IRC Session Thursday July 9 UPDATED http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/07/zenoss-irc-session-thursday-july-9/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/07/zenoss-irc-session-thursday-july-9/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:06:10 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1195 Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, July 9 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, Zope upgrades in Subversion, recent community events or anything else you wish to talk about.

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

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

UPDATE: The log for the session is here: IRC Session 7/09/2009

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/07/zenoss-irc-session-thursday-july-9/feed/ Getting Started With Zenoss Core Webinar July 9 http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/07/getting-started-with-zenoss-core-webinar-july-9/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/07/getting-started-with-zenoss-core-webinar-july-9/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 20:59:48 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1191 Have you recently downloaded Zenoss Core, or do you have questions implementing the solution in your environment? If so, please register to attend our bi-weekly Getting Started with Zenoss Core Webinar. The July 9 session is still open for sign-up, if you can’t make this session, the next one is already on the schedule. You can register for either one here:

Thursday, July 9 12:00 p.m. EDT

Tuesday, July 28 12:00 p.m. EDT

Here’s what you’ll get out of the session:

  • Installing the software properly
  • Preparing your environment
  • Logging in to get started
  • Adding, classifying and auto-discovering your devices
  • Getting and staying organized
  • Seeing the “big picture” (dashboard, network map, event console, Google Maps, etc.)
  • Avoiding common mistakes

We also have a Zenoss engineer available to answer questions live – and believe me, there are plenty of questions submitted! If you’re interested in seeing past Q&A logs, take a look at some of the previous sessions on the Zenoss blog where we document and upload all of the questions submitted along with answers. We will update this post with the Q&A from the webinar after the session is over.

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/07/getting-started-with-zenoss-core-webinar-july-9/feed/ Zenoss Newsletter - June 2009 http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/02/zenoss-newsletter-june-2009/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/02/zenoss-newsletter-june-2009/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:08:20 +0000 Mark Hinkle http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1186 This month we had lots of new software updates. Zenoss Enterprise 2.4.2 was released along with Zenoss Core 2.4.2. We’ve also received a landslide of ZenPacks from the community. Thank you to everyone who contributed to these latest releases as a developer, tester and/or user.

Zenoss Enterprise 2.4.2 is here!

The latest version of Zenoss Enterprise adds several features and enhancements that align with needs of enterprise IT infrastructure monitoring. Check out these exciting new features:

  • Normalization of Metrics Across Heterogeneous Technologies
  • Scalable, Secure Monitoring of Linux/Unix Servers
  • Monitoring of Internal or External Web Services
  • Expanded Device and Applications Support
  • Simplified Setup and Configuration
  • Support for VMware vSphere 4.0

Read More >>

Summer of Community ZenPacks

The Zenoss Summer of Community ZenPacks Contest is still going strong and has had a tremendous response so far, and we’re not even halfway through! We’ve already had more entries than last year’s contest and we’re on track to potentially double that. So check out our new crop of ZenPacks for databases (MySQL, MSSQL), Nortel, SuSE Linux and many more generated by the Zenoss community.

Read More >>

Do you Manage VMware?

Do you want to monitor VMware with the same tool as you monitor your servers and storage? Do you want to know what virtual machines are running on a particular server? Zenoss Enterprise’s VMware monitoring features allow IT teams to monitor their physical and virtual environments with a single product. Check it out today!

Read More >>

MindTouch Collaboration Software

MindTouch is an open source enterprise collaboration platform used to change the way businesses share information, consume content, and collaborate. Having a secure wiki-like interface to share and store troubleshooting procedures and passwords is only half the battle. Monitoring your infrastructure is also necessary, which is why MindTouch and Zenoss have teamed up to deliver you a way to mashup the knowledge-sharing and Collaborative Network capabilities of MindTouch with that of the monitoring capabilities of Zenoss Core. As a Zenoss user, we thought you might benefit from the synergy between both of these tools. Find out more about the Zenoss and MindTouch Collaborative Network mashup here.

Read More >>

Tip of the Month: “Tracking File System Growth”

This month’s tip comes from the Zenoss Users Forum topic Tracking file system growth, not percentage of disk used. The default file system graphs show utilization as an overall percentage, but this tip lets you watch the disk usage on file systems over time. Thank you to community member Wouter “netdata” D’Haeseleer for sharing this tip.

Read More >>

Thank you for your interest and support for Zenoss.

Mark Hinkle, VP of Community

Mark R. Hinkle
Vice President, Community
Zenoss Inc.
Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/mrhinkle

]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/02/zenoss-newsletter-june-2009/feed/ Q&A Session for Getting Started with Zenoss http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/02/qa-session-for-getting-started-with-zenoss/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/02/qa-session-for-getting-started-with-zenoss/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:00:27 +0000 Mark Hinkle http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1183 Here are the questions and answers from this week’s Getting Started With Zenoss session. These are a good source of information for those people starting to use Zenoss. If you would like to attend a future online training session you can reserve your spot today.

Q: How can we monitor from our site the connection between a NAS device at customer site and the offsite backup data center?

A: you could add the router at the offsite back up location to the ping class. if the router is not pingable, you will get an alert and you will know connection is down.

Q: How can we monitor a process on a customer’s Windows server which is connected to a monitored NAS ?

A: Windows process monitoring can be accomplished by SNMP. You must enable SNMP in windows. See the admin guide for “How to configure windows devices”.

Q: Does the Zenoss VMAppliance have the zenpack already installed?

A: the Zenoss VMware Appliance is the Zenoss CORE application only. The Zenoss Core-Zenpacks package must be installed separately. The appliance is a good choice if you have only  a windows machine available to test out Zenoss. If you have a CentOS, RHEL, or other supported Zenoss Core platform, I recommend you install on that.

Q: in the commercial version, are there any Linux distributions not supported?

A: almost any linux distro can be monitored - if net-snmmp is supported - we can likely monitor it, but each system needs to be tested. Some distributions can present issues due to the lack of a net-snmp binary and/or host resource MIB. If considering Zenoss Enterprise, please ask your sales contact about any specific distributions that you will need to monitor.

Q: Can a particular filesystem for a particular device be ignored for alerst (for example, drives which are naturally full)?

A: yes - there is zProperty called zFileSystemMapIgnoreNames in which you can specify a regex to ignore file systems. see admin guide for more info on zProperties. You can also use alerting rules and event transforms to further customize your alert strategy.

Q: How do you create a default location?

A: click on Locations (in left nav), click on “Down Arrow” beside the “Sub-Locations”, choose “Add New Organizer”

Q: Can I monitor voip on a cisco device?

A: In core, you can monitor syslog and trap events - which will give you some view of your VOIP. Monitoring VOIP may mean different things to different groups.  We monitor Cisco IP-SLA in Enterprise, which is a common way to measure VOIP related performance.

Q: Is there any differnce between sorting by “group” and sorting by “system” in regards to Zenoss features?

A: no difference from a feature perspective. These are simply “buckets” in which you can classify your devices. You can then use these “buckets” to help filter your alerting / event rules.

Q: is there a way to add a device manually? Without using the auto-detect feature?

A: Yes. You can choose the “Add Device” link from the left navigation menu. You can also choose add device from the page menu directly within the device class you want to put the device. And lastly, you can add without any modeling by simply setting the “protocol” to “none”.

Q: what is the difference between /Server/Linux and /Server/SSH/Linux?

A: /Server/Linux will perform SNMP based modeling and monitoring, /Server/SSH/Linux will use SSH connectivity to model and monitor your device. SNMP is by far the preferred method but SSH can be used when SNMP is not possible.

Q:  Is it possible to add any of the graphs for a device to the portlets?

There is a community zenpack that seems to accomplish this task. Please see http://community.zenoss.org/trac-zenpacks/ and look for “Show Graph Portlet” zenpack.

Q: Under the networks tab in my Zenoss install it auto-discovers many networks that are not actually in my environment that I do not want to monitor.  When I remove them they come back the next day.  Is there any way to stop that from happening?

A: Add a regex that matches them to zLocalIpAddresses. Any IP that is matched by this regex won’t create an entry in /Networks.

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/07/02/qa-session-for-getting-started-with-zenoss/feed/ Summer of ZenPacks Contest Progress Report http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/26/summer-of-zenpacks-contest-progress-report/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/26/summer-of-zenpacks-contest-progress-report/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:26:34 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1177 The Zenoss Summer of Community ZenPacks Contest is still going strong and has had a tremendous response so far, and we’re not even halfway through! We’ve already had more entries than last year’s contest and we’re on track to potentially double that.

There have been a lot of really great entries, here is a quick rundown of all the ZenPacks so far:

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 so far, looking forward to more entries!

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/26/summer-of-zenpacks-contest-progress-report/feed/ Getting Started With Zenoss Core Webinar June 30 http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/26/getting-started-with-zenoss-core-webinar-june-30/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/26/getting-started-with-zenoss-core-webinar-june-30/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:58:08 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1174 Have you recently downloaded Zenoss Core, or do you have questions implementing the solution in your environment? If so, please register to attend our bi-weekly Getting Started with Zenoss Core Webinar. The June 30 session is still open for sign-up, if you can’t make this session, the next one is already on the schedule. You can register for either one here:

Tuesday, June 30 9:00 a.m. EDT

Thursday, July 9 12:00 p.m. EDT

Here’s what you’ll get out of the session:

  • Installing the software properly
  • Preparing your environment
  • Logging in to get started
  • Adding, classifying and auto-discovering your devices
  • Getting and staying organized
  • Seeing the “big picture” (dashboard, network map, event console, Google Maps, etc.)
  • Avoiding common mistakes

We also have a Zenoss engineer available to answer questions live – and believe me, there are plenty of questions submitted! If you’re interested in seeing past Q&A logs, take a look at some of the previous sessions on the Zenoss blog where we document and upload all of the questions submitted along with answers. We will update this post with the Q&A from the webinar after the session is over.

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/26/getting-started-with-zenoss-core-webinar-june-30/feed/ Zenoss 2.4.2 is Now Available http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/25/zenoss-242-is-now-available/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/25/zenoss-242-is-now-available/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:07:44 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1150 We are proud to announce the Zenoss 2.4.2 maintenance release which fixes several critical issues. Zenoss Core 2.4.2 is now available for download:
http://www.zenoss.com/download

The 2.4.2 release notes are available for download (PDF).

Installation and upgrades from earlier versions are covered in the unified Zenoss Core 2.4 Installation Guide (PDF).

This is primarily a stability release that addresses these 46 tickets. Thanks again for your feedback!

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/25/zenoss-242-is-now-available/feed/ Tip of the Month: Tracking File System Growth http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/24/tip-of-the-month-tracking-file-system-growth/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/24/tip-of-the-month-tracking-file-system-growth/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:00:16 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1158 This month’s tip comes from the Zenoss Users Forum topic Tracking file system growth, not percentage of disk used. The default filesystem graphs show utilization as an overall percentage, but this tip lets you watch the disk usage on filesystems over time. Zenoss Community member Wouter “netdata” D’Haeseleer provides the following:

Instructions

  1. Go to the Device Template you want to update (/Devices/Server/SSH/Linux for example)
  2. Select the FileSystem Template
  3. Add a new Graph Definition and name it Utilization Bytes or whatever you prefer.
  4. Add a new Graph Point DataPoint, select the disk_usedBlocks.
  5. Select the new usedBlocks and set the RPN value to
    ${here/blockSize},*
  6. Save and exit.
  7. Go to your device OS tab and select a File System

You should have a nice graph like this:
picture-4

The nice part of this solution is that Zenoss has been collecting this data so the new graph is automatically filled with historical data. You can go back and add thresholds as you see fit to alert when certain values

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/24/tip-of-the-month-tracking-file-system-growth/feed/ SouthEast LinuxFest Followup http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/23/southeast-linuxfest-followup/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/23/southeast-linuxfest-followup/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:57:24 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1139 selfbadge_white

We had a really great time at SouthEast LinuxFest and are looking forward to attending again next year! There were well over 500 attendees and by all accounts the show was a great success for the community of Open Source users. The winner of the Dell Mini with Ubuntu Linux was Norton Cater of Greenville, SC; if you see him be sure to congratulate him! Thanks again to all the volunteers who helped run the show and to everyone who stopped by our booth!

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]]> http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/23/southeast-linuxfest-followup/feed/ Zenoss IRC Session Thursday June 25 at 11am EDT UPDATED http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/23/zenoss-irc-session-thursday-june-25-at-11am-edt/ http://blog.zenoss.com/2009/06/23/zenoss-irc-session-thursday-june-25-at-11am-edt/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:00:22 +0000 Matt Ray http://blog.zenoss.com/?p=1144 Zenoss developers will be available for questions on Thursday, June 25 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, recent community events or anything else you wish to talk about.

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

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

UPDATE: The log for the session is here: IRC Session 6/25/2009

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