Hosting and Consultancy Looks for Easy-to-Use Open Source Monitoring
 | "Zenoss is the only product with which you can easily setup devices and perform actions that were never thought of by the developers. For example, I can setup a relay that hooks to the building fire alarm so if it goes off, my servers automatically start an off-site replication.” Jeff Siler President webAJ.com |
| Jeff’s full time job is deploying agents and trudging through endless .conf files in order to get monitoring up and running on his company’s devices. Pyche! This is actually NOT Jeff’s full-time job, and so when his network tripled in size last summer, he wanted to find a robust, open source monitoring solution that he could deploy quickly and easily. His search ended when he came upon Zenoss. Cool Stuff Jeff’s Doing with Zenoss – a.k.a. If only the Kitchen Sink had SNMP… Finding himself very comfortable with Zenoss, one day Jeff needed a better way to monitor the temperature in his server room. Why not use Zenoss? And so his customization adventure began. In the true spirit of community, once Jeff got it working just how he wanted it, he shared what he had learned by writing a detailed, step-by-step how-to, and published it on his web site. The tutorial uncovers helpful tips such as, once you’ve added the device, you will see Zenoss try to model it via SNMP, which could result in some errors and warnings, but this DOES NOT mean you were not successful. Jeff also goes the extra mile, saying: "Let’s review: We added a MIB file, a new device and found out the OID number we want to use. Now lets make them work together and do something real important, make a cool temperature graph." But Wait – There’s More Cool Stuff – How about Using SplunkTM to Search Zenoss Logs Jeff’s next project is to set up Splunk on the same server as Zenoss and integrate both of them so he can connect Splunk to the Zenoss MySQL database in order to search Zenoss logs. | The Company webAJ.com is a computer consulting and web design firm located in Houston Texas. webAJ.com selects from leading open and closed source solutions to provide clients with the optimal solution for their specific needs. webAJ.com modernizes their client’s IT infrastructure with productivity-enhancing solutions like digital faxing, electronic signatures, web-based applications and thin clients. The Challenge When webAJ.com brought a bunch of new servers online last summer, Jeff went looking for something as robust as, but easier to deploy than, Nagios. The Zenoss Advantage Jeff looked at several other “open source” solutions, but invariably, the key features were only available as part of the commercial offering. Then he found Zenoss, and since deploying it, Jeff has hardly stopped throwing stuff into it “because it’s so easy.” |
