As a brand new Zenoss user, I thought I'd briefly share my initial experiences after a few days of working with Zenoss 2.0.6.
We use Novell's SLES as our Linux server platform of choice, so that is what I built as the underlying OS for Zenoss. The latest version of SLES is SP1, which I installed. I then followed the install guides for the SUSE platform as closely as possible to be able to use the EL5 RPMs, but I was not successful. There were dependencies on packages that were older than that which came with SLES 10 SP1 distribution. After a couple of hours of effort there, I stopped trying that route. Being a heavy VMware shop, I then downloaded the Zenoss appliance and VMware player. Without too much effort, I was able to get the appliance to boot up. So far, so good. The next step was to log in. this proved to be very frustrating. The documentation and the forums indicated that I would see the URL displayed at the end of the boot process, and that I would log in using the defaults of admin/zenoss. The URL was displayed, but the default name and password would not work. I tried many times, with differing combinations. After more reading, it finally became apparent that the URL displayed on the command line was not for the Zenoss web console itself, but for the rPath virtual appliance management interface. I later found an obscure reference to a default login of admin/password for that interface, which did work to get me into the rPath configuration page. After changing the default password there, I opened a new browser window using the URL specified in the documentation, which presented the familiar login screen, and which did accept the default admin/zenoss authentication. Once in, I was impressed by the elegance of the interface, while being daunted by the available options. I especially like the dashboard view, although I've not found out how to adjust the size of the fonts (for better viewing from a distance). The interface seemed to work quite well, but I really didn't know my way around. Being late at night, I configured the system just enough to have it start the discovery process on our network and then I went home. When I came back in this morning, I immediately started encountering errors when trying to do simple tasks such as view a device or add a device. It had discovered about 150 or so devices, which is about 1/3 of our total network. A look at the appliance console revealed a problem with low memory. So I uninstalled VMware Player and installed VMware Server instead, allowing me to adjust the memory size of the virtual machine upwards. That helped for a bit, but soon I was also out of disk space. To correct this problem, I shut down the virtual appliance, created a second much larger virtual disk, then booted with a Ghost 8 CD and ghosted the contents of the first disk to the second. I then deleted the first disk and set the SCSI ID to 0:0 and booted up the appliance. I now had much more free disk space. I spent the rest of today just looking and learning, and migrating the discovered devices into custom classes. Since we've not used SNMP to monitor our network devices in the past, I have a lot of configuration work to do on our network before everything will report correctly. At the end of the day, I am having problems keeping the status deamon running. It was working fine earlier in the day, but won't stay running now. I'll do more testing on it tomorrow and hopefully report back. I also don't know how to monitor services on the devices. As has been stated before, there isn't much good, thorough documentation and the available ZENpacks are lacking, at least 'core' version. I came home questioning whether I should spend any more time messing with it if it was going to be unreliable or very difficult to install. But after reviewing my options, this still seems like a best-of-breed app for the cost. So I'll continue my exploration a bit longer. Hope this helps some one else. Curtis -------------------- m2f -------------------- Read this topic online here: http://community.zenoss.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=10656#10656 -------------------- m2f -------------------- _______________________________________________ zenoss-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zenoss.org/mailman/listinfo/zenoss-users
