Zenoss

Zenoss is a network and systems monitoring platform that is targeted to enterprise deployments. The product is Python-based and is offered both in a free, open source "Community Edition" download for Linux (MySQL is also required), as well as a commercial Enterprise Edition, itself split into Silver and Gold flavors. Zenoss is offered and developed by Zenoss, Inc., who additionally provides commercial services (training, consulting, etc.) and support around the product offering (the Enterprise Gold Edition additionally offers indemnification).

The Zenoss architecture has at its core the "Standard Model," a detailed description of managed devices as well as the relationships between managed devices. This model is created through auto-discovery (using existing data transports such as WMI, SNMP, etc.), through manual interaction through the Web interface, or through programmatic interaction via the Zenoss APIs. On top of this Standard Model is a Zope-based Web interface, wherein all user interactions take place (Firefox, Seamonkey, and IE7 are listed as fully supported; with partial support offered for Safari and Opera); and feeding the standard model is the data collection layer of components and daemons, which itself is broken into five areas: automated modeling (auto-discovery features), availability monitoring (with ping, WMI, TCP connection testing and SNMP components), event collection daemons (Syslog, WMI, SNMP traps), performance monitoring (SNMP, XML-RPC, or the Zencommand daemon which facilitates the the running of Nagios and Cactii plug-ins on the local box or on remote boxes through SSH), and automated responses (for alerting).

Specific capabilities of the platform include availability monitoring, which is typically performed in an agentless manner (no additional software is required to be loaded on the target system) via such actions as ping tests, process tests, or service tests; event management, through the reception of events from the Zenoss monitoring daemons, Syslog and SNMP traps, and integration within the standard model; inventory and change tracking; and performance monitoring, for the tracking of resource information and their changes over time (SNMP, custom scripts, or XML-RPC are all supported).

Multiple reporting options are available, including those focused on devices, events, performance, availability, etc.; and the Web interface itself allows for the customization of dashboard displays. Reporting features include support for the generation of custom reports from any Zenoss Core component as well as the use of pre-configured templates; support for E-mail reports with embedded graphs/images; and support for the reporting of both real-time and historical data.

As mentioned earlier, Zenoss is offered in both free (no support) downloads, and the Enterprise Edition, with extended features and vendor support.

New features in the latest release of Zenoss Enterprise include:

- Virtual server management, including the ability to discover/monitor guest operating systems

- Role/user-based access controls (set at the group or device level)

- Support for automatic baselining and predictive thresholds

- Support for SNMP v3

- Geographical visualization through Google Maps mash-up

- Agentless JMX collector for monitoring of J2EE/Java applications

- AJAX-based dashboard

Zenoss is available now. Pricing for Zenoss Enterprise Silver Edition is $100 per managed resource per year, while pricing for the Gold Edition (adds patch management, remote administration, and indemnification, among other features) is $150 per resource per year.

Visit the vendor's Web site for further information.