"I've got over 150 devices in Zenoss, including PDUs, UPS devices, switches and servers. Zenoss is by far the easiest monitoring solution to deploy, add devices to and use that I've ever experienced. "

Todd Davis
CLEC Consortium

Responsiveness and Rapid Innovation - an Open Source Advantage

Red Hat has a term for it - they call it Customer-driven Innovation. Theoretically, customers are what drive all companies to innovate, but it's a question of degrees. The author of Wikinomics, the popular book on Mass Collaboration, cites a client who has a different term for it: Where some vendors suffer from acute cases of NIH (Not Invented Here), his client rewards employees that display PFE - Proudly Found Elsewhere.

At Zenoss, we are proud to follow in Red Hat's footsteps, and eagerly incorporate ideas and code contributions from our community. So, when Todd contacted us and expressed strong interest in support for certain compilers, as well as in RPM support, we had that ready for him in the next release.

Unlike Big 4 Systems Management vendors that prioritize feature requests based on the size of the requestor's market capitalization, Zenoss bases it on the merit of the idea. It's remarkable what happens when you open your code up to scrutiny and transparency - you get better code that innovates faster.

Openness and Standards Make Integration Easy

Another division in Todd’s company uses NetCool, and there is an interest across the organization to tie the two systems together in order to share important information. Todd has already conducted a proof-of-concept to relay syslogs and traps from Zenoss to NetCool, which resides behind another firewall.

Todd appreciates Zenoss' easy-to-use graphical interface when adding devices to management.

The Organization

As a consortium of Local Exchange Carriers (LECs), Todd's organization provides its members with a variety of mission-critical shared data services.

The Challenge

As Todd's environment grew in size and complexity, his satisfaction with Nagios declined. The incumbent solution required him to memorize endless command definitions, and in order to do graphing, he needed yet another tool, and yet more memorization.

The Zenoss Advantage

After first learning about Zenoss in early 2006, Todd took a look but wasn't quite ready to take the leap. He sent in a few emails with his feedback, to which he received replies from Zenoss Co-Founder and CTO Erik Dahl. After meeting with Zenoss representatives at the LISA event in Washington, DC at the end of 2006, Todd was impressed with the new functionality and significant improvements in the system. After the show, a quick lab deployment convinced Todd that Zenoss was more than ready to replace Nagios as his primary monitoring solution.