Kick the Tires on Zenoss

"Zenoss is a new open source, company-backed network management system. It manages applications as well as servers and network devices---we'll explain what that means shortly. We decided it was time to give it an honest run for its money. Wait, it is free, but still we wanted to give it a real review. This article will be a light how-to focused on our experiences and first impressions with Zenoss. Next, we'll attempt to convert a real production environment's monitoring system from Nagios to Zenoss.

"The Zenoss installation process is relatively painless. After installing dependencies, you need to download the Zenoss tarball and run the installer script that comes with it. The installation guides, while they do provide the necessary information, are painful to read. The Ubuntu guide, for example, suggests that we add a user named 'zenoss' and set the password to 'zenoss' if security isn't a concern. The entire document assumes you are new to Linux, which is also extremely annoying. One is left to assume that this was community-contributed documentation..."

Complete Story

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• 'Big Four' Systems Management Vendors Ripe for Open Source Shake-Up(Aug 01, 2007)
• Interoperability Without Patent Agreements. Really.(Jul 19, 2007)
• Open-Source Network Management Gets Put to the Test(Jun 27, 2007)