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.
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.
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. |
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:
#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
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.
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.