Open source's hottest 10 apps part 2

David M Williams
Thursday, 21 June 2007 12:52

Business IT - Open Source

#3 – Zenoss Core – Enterprise IT Monitoring

Zenoss Core is a highly useful tool for managing networks and systems across an enterprise. It provides a single integrated product for monitoring the availability, performance, events and configuration of servers, computers and networking equipment across an eitre local- or wide-area network.

For administrators, this is a brilliant tool and provides facilities which would otherwise only be available in very expensive packages. From the onset, its autodiscovery and auditing of network devices more than proves its worth. Indeed, there's costly commercial products which can't even perform this essential task.

Using a simple dashboard, administrators can easily see their networks health at a glance. Systems, events, devices, services and products can be listed, grouped and probed. Flexible reporting brings back essential information with barely a click.

Real-time graphs show system uptime and responsiveness and the unexpected loss of connection to any device is reported swiftly in an event log. This is not constrained to just servers: any client computer or other network device can also be monitored. Alerts can be acknowledged as they are responded to, filtering them out of the list so new alerts are easily recognisable.

Zenoss Core is written in Python/Zope with a MySQL backend database and can be installed and executed on any system which has an available Python interpreter and MySQL build - which covers all Windows, Linux and MacOS systems. Anyone responsible for a network of whatever size would find immense benefit here.