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Rollout: Zenoss Core: Page 3 of 5

It's The Model

Your network is ever-changing, and Zenoss Core's well-designed device-discovery mechanism should help you keep up. By building a detailed, hierarchical model, we had the flexibility to easily organize our devices by group (organizational unit) or by system (functional unit), and we could customize monitoring around different device types. Configuration changes can be attached to a host or to the structure.

That's all well and good, but sorting devices can be tedious, even for small networks. Fortunately, Zenoss Core can discover hosts on the network automatically, on demand and on a continuous basis. We could describe arbitrary values, such as OS version and hardware details, to map devices into appropriate places in the hierarchy.

Once nodes are properly placed, Zenoss starts collecting information--everything from performance, to event monitoring and log watching, to tracking changes made to the host or within Zenoss. We were impressed that the product distilled all this data into the most relevant information, yet we could easily see all the data that triggered, and potentially cleared, any event. And, Zenoss Core sports an elaborate and extensive system that allows for customized notification schedules.

To get its information, Zenoss Core 2.0 uses not only standard SNMP MIB2 and net-SNMP MIB modules, SNMP traps, port scanning, and network protocols like ICMP, it can handle WMI (Windows Management Integration) calls, SSH, telnet, and Nagios and/or custom commands. For processing SNMP traps, vendor-provided SNMP MIB modules can be added using the command line.