Yeah, I've run into my share of Zenoss issues as well. Although I wouldn't call the docs 'good', but rather 'fair'. In many cases I'll search for something and find that it doesn't give much more than a trivial mention of an obvious case. Unless I'm looking in the wrong area, there doesn't seem to be a way to get the "why" behind the "what".
A recent example is heartbeats. I don't know what the significance of this is. Is it an ICMP ping? No idea. The docs basically tell you how to clear heartbeats, but don't explain what a heartbeat is, why you'd want to clear the heartbeat, why you would NOT want to clear the heartbeats, where heartbeats fit into the grand scheme of things, etc. And I have a similar quibble regarding the fora. But on a related note, some of these issues seem to be prime candidate for a community-edited FAQ or wiki. Yes, I did see the Zenoss wiki, here: http://www.zenoss.com/community/wiki But it doesn't seem to have much in the way of content. And of course there's the wiki over on Trac, but it doesn't seem to be open to the community. Sidebar: In quite a few cases that I've seen, a lot of the HTML doc links bring you to a brand new page which doesn't have a lot of content. I see an opportunity for consolidation here. It just seems to me that opening up a wiki which is known to folks (eg, dokuwiki, MoinMoin, Mediawiki) would provide a familiar vehicle to reducing the churn a bit and arguably facilitate the creation of documentation which is better than the original. I've deployed and used Nagios in the past. Pretty detailed docs, although it does take a fair bit of reading before you can even get started. And the product itself seems (as I recall) to be rock-solid. Once you've finished doing umpteen config file edit sit-ups, that is. That's an obvious use case where Zenoss totally leaves Nagios in the dust. Anyway, I'm largely supportive of F/OSS in general, and Zenoss in particular. I think with better docs (with explanations regarding Event error msgs and how to go about resolving them, starting at the level of an experienced sysadmin and gradually providing more details for the complete n00b) it would likely gain more traction. It would be interesting to get a count of the number of people who tried Zenoss then gave it the toss out of frustration. I think I actually went down that path myself once, about a year ago. My $0.02. -------------------- m2f -------------------- Read this topic online here: http://community.zenoss.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=17369#17369 -------------------- m2f -------------------- _______________________________________________ zenoss-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zenoss.org/mailman/listinfo/zenoss-users
