”Zenoss is a great product, and Release. 2.0 is really easy on the eyes. What sets Zenoss apart, though, is that it’s the only enterprise monitoring solution that delivers all the functionality our large and mission-critical network needs that I can literally deploy in a day.”

SNMP is ubiquitous, running on nearly every computing and networking device. So when the engineers at Zenoss set out to build a new kind of Enterprise Monitoring System that would be Easy, Open and Complete, SNMP seemed like an excellent place to start. SNMP is indeed central to the flexibility, ease-of-deployment and universality of coverage that Zenoss delivers.

Allen uses Zenoss to monitor over one thousand devices in a single site alone, including servers, NetApp storage devices and Foundry core switches. When you’re talking hundreds of switches, each with 24, 48 and more ports, Allen gets into the thousands of RRD files real quick, and Zenoss handles it without so much as a peep.

Allen and his colleague Kent Lee took advantage of the fact that Zenoss is open source to add some very cool features, ones they’ve shared with the Zenoss Community.

MySQL Cluster Sync

Allen recognized that they could use Zenoss in combination with a custom Perl script and XMLRPC and REST to sync up their MySQL databases into the right clusters.

Custom Templating System

Allen’s colleague Kent loved that all the information he wanted to see was right there in Zenoss, but he wanted to display it in a more consolidated way. And in a short couple days, Kent’s custom templating system was born (screeshot below), and is available to all Zenoss users at:

http://community.zenoss.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1693

An Aggregate View screencapture of Kent Lee’s custom Zenoss templating system