Book Image

Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring

By : Michael Badger
Book Image

Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring

By: Michael Badger

Overview of this book

<p>For system administrators, network engineers, and security analysts, it is essential to keep a track of network traffic. At some point it will be necessary to read the network traffic directly instead of monitoring application level details. Network security audits, debug network configurations, and usage patterns analyzing can all require network traffic monitoring. This task can be achieved by using network monitoring software, or network sniffers, that sniff the traffic and display it on your computer on the network. <br /><br />Zenoss is an enterprise network and systems management application written in Python/Zope that provides an integrated product for monitoring availability, performance, events and configuration across layers and across platforms. Zenoss provides an AJAX-enabled web interface that allows system administrators to monitor availability, inventory/configuration, performance, and events. Whether you monitor five devices or a thousand devices, Zenoss provides a scalable solution for you.<br /><br />This book will show you how to work with Zenoss and effectively adapt Zenoss for a System and Network monitoring.&nbsp; Starting with the Zenoss basics, it requires no existing systems management knowledge, and whether or not you can recite MIB trees and OIDs from memory is irrelevant. Advanced users will be able to identify ways in which they can customize the system to do more, while less advanced users will appreciate the ease of use Zenoss provides.<br /><br />The book contains step-by-step examples to demonstrate Zenoss Core’s capabilities. The best approach to using this book is to sit down with Zenoss and apply the examples found in these pages to your system.</p>
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Zenoss Core Network and System Monitoring
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Event Attributes
TALES and Device Attributes

Email Events


Turn email into events with zenmail and zenpop3. Zenmail allows us to start an internal SMTP server and direct other devices to send alerts directly to Zenoss via the open SMTP port. The message gets turned into an event in Zenoss. We can use the zenpop3 daemon to retrieve emails from a specified account and generate events based on those emails.

To use either program in daemon mode, we edit the $ZENHOME/bin/zenoss configuration file, so that the daemons start when Zenoss starts. Also, the daemons will be available via Settings > Daemons in the Zenoss portal.

As the Zenoss user:

  1. 1. Back up $ZENHOME/bin/zenoss.

  2. 2. Open $ZENHOME/bin/zenoss in a text editor.

  3. 3. Find the line in the script that begins with $ZENHOME/bin/zenfunctions and uncomment or add the following lines (refer to the next screenshot):

    • C="$C zenmail"

    • C="$C zenpop3"

  4. 4. Restart the Zenoss daemons with the command zenoss restart.

When we restart the Zenoss daemon, zenmail and zenpop3 print warning messages that...