Book Image

Zenoss Core 3.x Network and System Monitoring

By : Michael Badger
Book Image

Zenoss Core 3.x Network and System Monitoring

By: Michael Badger

Overview of this book

For system administrators, network engineers, and security analysts, it is essential to keep a track of network traffic. Zenoss Core is an enterprise-level systems and network monitoring solution that can be as complex as you need it to be. And while just about anyone can install it, turn it on, and monitor "something", Zenoss Core has a complicated interface packed with features. The interface has been drastically improved over version 2, but it's still not the type of software you can use intuitively – in other words, a bit of guidance is in order. The role of this book is to serve as your Zenoss Core tour guide and save you hours, days, maybe weeks of time. This book will show you how to work with Zenoss and effectively adapt Zenoss for System and Network monitoring. Starting with the Zenoss basics, it requires no existing knowledge of systems management, 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. 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. The book covers the monitoring basics: adding devices, monitoring for availability and performance, processing events, and reviewing reports. It also dives into more advanced customizations, such as custom device reports, external event handling (for example, syslog server, zensendevent, and Windows Event Logs), custom monitoring templates using SNMP data sources, along with Nagios, and Cacti plugins. An example of a Nagios-style plugin is included and the book shows you where to get an example of a Cacti-compatible plugin for use as a command data source in monitoring templates. In Zenoss Core, ZenPacks are modules that add monitoring functionality. Using the Nagios plugin example, you will learn how to create, package, and distribute a ZenPack. You also learn how to explore Zenoss Core's data model using zendmd so that you can more effectively write event transformations and custom device reports.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Zenoss Core 3.x Network and System Monitoring
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Event Attributes
Device Attributes
Example snmpd.conf
Index

Monitoring Templates


Templates allow us to customize our data collection when we decide the Zenoss Core defaults no longer meet our needs. We could for example, collect data for a specific OID, implement a Nagios plugin, or create our own plugin.

Monitoring Templates tell Zenoss what data sources to collect from and how to graph the data. They can also establish monitoring thresholds on the collected data, which we can use to generate events. We apply templates to the device 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 all the monitoring templates in Zenoss Core, click on the Advanced menu and then select Monitoring Templates. In the sidebar you will see an expandable list of templates. Let's look at an example.

Expand the Device heading and click on /Server/Linux. The details of the template will display, as shown in the following screenshot:

As you look over the list of monitoring templates,...