I'll answer as best I can inline:
felixsmile wrote:
Hello everyone,
Even after installing Zenoss, I am not totally certain of what Zenoss
can do for me, and how, it's absolutely confusing to me. So I'll try
to post what I have understood from IRC and by reading forum posts
and the documentation, and would be very happy if someone could
correct me.
In what follows, I'll use the term "server", for the central Zenoss
server and "clients" for the machines that I want to make an
inventory of.
• The server runs on many common platforms (in my case Ubuntu
Feisty 7.04 Desktop).
Yes, though it currently runs best on RHEL derivatives like CENTOS5. Or
by best, I mean easiest to get going correctly. Ubuntu is known to have
issues right now, though they are working on a deb ...
• The clients can be either Windows or *nix
machines and do not need to have a special software installed to be
recognized by Zenoss.
Sort of right and sort of wrong. Windows needs either SNMP Informant, or
you need Zenoss Enterprise to get some performance metrics like
CPU/Memory load. You can use either SNMP or SSH scripts (zenoss plugins
I think) on *nix machines. I do recommend SNMP though.
You could also do some custom setup with nagios plugins to get info or
do your own programming for WMI access on Windows.
o Non Windows clients should have snmp enabled
for Zenoss to be able to retrieve information other than ping
information.
Windows needs SNMP setup correctly as well.
o Windows clients can be “checked� via two methods:
either snmp or via WMI. When WMI is enabled on the Windows machine,
Zenoss can retrieve some information out of WMI. This is achieved
through the module Zenwin which needs to be installed on the server.
(or is it installed by default?) The Zenwin module runs on all the
platforms that are supported by Zenoss.
In 2.x Zenwin is installed by default.
o For some reasons, Zenoss
can login via SSH or telnet into the devices, but cannot use either
of the two protocols to retrieve information?
Generally it could via SSH + plugins, but I expect you are referring to
the connection methods to pass commands to the machines. This is how you
would, for instance, restart a service in response to a down alert.
• There is an
Enterprise edition of Zenoss which provides more features. Which
ones, I could not figure out clearly. What I could figure out clearly
is that Zenoss Enterprise has some support options.
As I understand it you get certified ZenPacks that give you more options
- WMI, better web site monitoring via synthetic transactions...
Now, if I understood this right, but I might obviously be totally
wrong, I am still quite far away from my goal. Here is what I have
done in my environment:
• Install Zenoss (from the tarball) on a Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 Desktop
(only the zensyslog service is not running because of some port
conflict; I was told on IRC I can live without, so I will for the
moment)
I think ZenSysLog is for bringing syslog events into Zenoss. Again, for
ease of setup I do recommend trying CENTOS5
• Have Zenoss discover some of my subnets. For some, it
worked fine, but some other, I could not manage to explain to Zenoss
that my subnets are not on /24 masks but on /20 masks and that I
would like it to accept my subnets. Well, let’s say I can live with
that, too, for the moment, but it could be one of the causes for some
of my problems.
I haven't used discovery so cannot comment, there are some known bugs
according to the mailinglist.
• When a device is discovered, I see some
information, but generally not even the operating system, and I am
not quite sure how to explain to it how to log in to a Windows
machine correctly (I set the zWinPassword and username, but this does
not seem to have a big effect on it). No idea where to set the *nix
login passwords (for SSH and telnet), is it zCommandPassword? If yes,
it has had no effect on my discovery.
This seems to be confusing, but you need to set an administrator level
password for WMI. The username needs to be entered for zWinUser like:
DOMAIN\USERNAME
or
.\USERNAME
if it's a local user. I recommend a special domain admin account for
ease on Windows, but it's really up to your security needs. You'll want
to be careful with access to the Zenoss web console as I have seen it
print out the username and password in cleartext in some displays.
I haven't tried remote commands on Linux clients, but I expect the
issues would be similar.
This is where I stand at the moment. I do not know if I need to buy
the Enterprise Edition for the features I need (basically, make an
inventory of my network, providing Zenoss with all the login
credentials needed), or if core does all I need, or if Zenoss is not
at all what I am looking for. In that case, what can one do with
Zenoss?
I'm not too sure how useful in it's current incarnation Zenoss would be
for inventory. Personally I've found OCSNG + Client much better if you
can put the software on the machines (but that really doesn't help with
network devices or network based discovery.
I find Zenoss useful right now for monitoring, that is letting me know a
service or machine went down, and restarting the service automatically.
I'm sure Zenoss CAN do an inventory as you can extend it in pretty much
any way you feel like programming, but right now it's not that easy to
extend. It's supposed to be getting better.
--
James Pulver
Information Technology Area Supervisor
LEPP Computer Group
Cornell University
_______________________________________________
zenoss-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.zenoss.org/mailman/listinfo/zenoss-users
