SAGE News

First in a three-part series, guest blogger and ;login: author, Matthew Sacks, presents his review of Open Source Enterprise Monitoring Tools. Matthew looked at Zenoss, GroundWork, and Hyperic. The first part will be a review of Zenoss.

Why we tested these:
There are a number of open source monitoring tools out there boasting large feature-sets and powerful management utilities that go beyond the traditional MRTG, Cacti, or Nagios installation. These monitoring tools utilize these classic open source utilities and build on them to cultivate a full-features enterprise-class monitoring solution. Although these are not the only monitoring tools out there, they are the key players in the open source enterprise monitoring arena.

What was rated:
– Installation process
– Ease of configuration
– Number of features
– Documentation

And now on to the review: Zenoss

Overview:
Zenoss is an open source enterprise monitoring application that is based off of MRTG the open source graphing and trending utility. Zenoss is a full-featured web-based monitoring console that allows one to easily trend and graph performance, alert and track events, and trend availability over time.

Installation:
Installation is a breeze with Zenoss. Out of the three enterprise monitoring utilities reviewed, Zenoss was by far the easiest and least painful to install. Simply run the installer, choose an installation directory and MySQL root password, and everything is installed through the installer script.

Configuration:
The catch to the super-simple installation process is that Zenoss takes a fair amount of work to get it configured to start monitoring an infrastructure. Luckily, Zenoss has a good discovery utility that maps out the network and gives the administrator a good point of reference for building out their infrastructure within Zenoss. The different properties and classifications methods within Zenoss are rather complex and non-intuitive at first; however, once configured, the amount of detail and extensibility Zenoss offers comes in handy in large, complex deployments. Zenoss uses SNMP as its primary method for collecting information from servers and devices. Zenoss does an excellent job of automatically discovering and populating information about a server or device. It does take a bit of tuning in terms of categorizing servers by location, hardware, and processes, etc. However, once this is done, this allows for a very useful feature set that can be leveraged against the organized data.

Features:
Besides standard reporting, alerting, and performance graphing, Zenoss has some nice features available that make enterprise monitoring a bit more powerful. Modeling plugins that ship with Zenoss allow for automatic population of information about a given device at the click of a button. This is a very powerful feature without the use of a software agent. Event correlation mappings are available when two or more events occur that serve as a smart engine for identifying a particular event.

Zenoss allows for native graphing of Linux server performance through the UCD-SNMP MIB and automatically creates graphs for load average, CPU, and memory. This can be extended through the usage of ZenPacks that has an API for easily extending the functionality of Zenoss. Zenoss has a few packs for monitoring Java processes (such as Heap size, Garbage Collection, etc), Apache Web servers, and Dell Hardware.

Conclusion:
Zenoss wins over the other monitoring solutions in ease of installation; although configuration is a bit trickier, and requires careful reading of the documentation in order to fully leverage its powerful classification and categorization features. The documentation is well thought out and easy to follow for configuring Zenoss. The agent-less deployment, network discovery, and device-modeling features work well within Zenoss with little to no configuration. The ZenPack extensions are a big plus in extending Zenoss as well as for monitoring more detailed information.

Zenoss Core is available here.

About the author:
Matthew Sacks works as a systems administrator. His focus is network, systems, and application performance tuning.