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

Performance Templates


Performance templates tell Zenoss what data sources to collect and how to graph the data. They use that data to establish monitoring thresholds, which we can in turn use to generate events. We apply template properties to the devices class or to the individual device. In Zenoss terminology, the process of applying a template to a device or a class is called binding.

To view the templates that are bound to a device class, navigate to the class (for example, /Server/Linux) and click the Templates tab (shown in the following screenshot).

Let's compare the template bindings for the /Server/Linux device class with that of the device Fox, a member of the /Server/Linux group. Navigate to the Status Overview page for Fox, and from the page menu, select More > Templates (refer to the following screenshot).

All of the templates applied to the class level apply to Fox and when Zenoss creates the graphs, it searches the device class hierarchy and matches the graph to the monitored...