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Network Monitoring With Zenoss

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PCQ Bureau
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Zenoss fits pretty well into the two fundamental roles: availability

monitoring and performance monitoring, and also provides the facility of

inventory tracking. Zenoss, written in Python, uses MySQL as backend for

storage. For enterprises, it is important for a system administrator to monitor

services and check that hosts are up and running. Also, once a decent monitoring

solution is in place, you also ought to get time-based information. For

instance, for memory and CPU usage, it gives you timely alerts. It has an option

that allows you to chart pretty RRD graphs of system statistics like RAM or disk

space.

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The key features that Zenoss integrates are inventory tracking, availability

and performance monitoring, and event monitoring. Zenoss provides flexibility in

use as it is capable of monitoring hosts with SNMP, SSH, Windows WMI, Nagios

agents, etc. The web interface is pretty decent and includes a customizable

dashboard for monitoring.

Installing Zenoss



The core version of Zenoss used in this article is freely available under

the GPL v2. An enterprise version is also available with additional features and

support. In this article, we installed Zenoss on CentOS 5.4 to observe its

capabilities. Though the installation part involves only a few steps, you might

need to carefully look into the packages that are required for it. As mentioned

above this tool requires MySQL and Python, so we downloaded the .rpm package and

installed it using both rpm and yum. To use it, login as root and run:

Cmd: # yum -y install mysql-server net-snmp net-snmp-utils gmp libgomp libgcj

liberation-fonts.

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Once done, you need to configure permissions (as we have installed MySQL).

# /etc/init.d/mysqld restart



# /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password ''


# /usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h Name of your server password ''

Tocreate an alert rule, select Settings and then the User

tab. Select a user and define rules for alerts.
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After running Zenoss, you can begin by setting a new user

account, setting the password or simply begin monitoring by adding devices.

Initially the password is left blank to successfully create the database by

Zenoss. And once it is done, you can set the desired password.

You can download the desired package from the link given above and install it

using rpm. We downloaded the rpm package for X86_64 CentOS. Now, run the

following command:

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#rpm -ivh zenoss-2.5.1.el5.x86_64.rpm

In case you have provided a different root password or

MySQL is operating on a different server, you need to adjust MYSQLHOST,

MYSQLROOTUSER & MYSQLROOTPASSWD values in /opt/zenoss/bin/zenoss_init_pre file.

Now, start the service using:

# service zenoss start

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To operate Zenoss, several ports should be open or the

alternate solution is to simply disable firewall by running:

#service iptables stop



#chkconfig iptables off

To launch Zenoss, run a web browser and type in http://localhost

(IP Add or domain name):8080.

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Once the configuration part is over, and you have Zenoss

working , you can simply go ahead and add devices that you want to monitor from

its web portal. For instance, in the Management category, you can add a device

and begin to monitor it. We tested our router that provides Internet

connectivity. In addition, within this category, you can run commands like ping,

DNS forward, DNS reverse, traceroute, view at the OS related information and

even performance related graphs.

Performance Monitoring



This tool lets you monitor Windows Server, virtual server host and Tomcat

(or other Java/JMX Server). You can even monitor the performance of Windows

Server using ZenWinPerf, which is an enterprise Zenpack for performance

monitoring.

Apart from that, to monitor a virtual server you can use

the Zenoss virtual host monitor Zenpack.

You can also create alert rules. After the occurrence of an

event, this tool categorizes and examines the defined rules to determine whether

a particular event matches any filters.

Next-Managing

Identities With OpenDS

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