Installing Zenoss on Ubuntu

While looking at new system monitoring solutions, I came to the realization that whatever tool was chosen it would still require a large outlay of man-hours to get it setup, configured, and working properly. Every tool is different, and has different ways of configuring it, different alerting functions, different graphing capabilities, and so on… So when I looked at open source solutions, I was quite pleased to see that Zenoss was capable of being implemented easily and was simple to customize and expand.

Here is the process to get Zenoss core installed on an Ubuntu server and begin monitoring a windows server.

Download and install Ubuntu Server 8.10

1. Download the ISO and burn it to a CD
2. Insert the CD into a server and install it as you normally would
3. Select to include the LAMP and OpenSSH modules
4. You could use Workstation, but best practice dictates to only install the features you need

Download and install the DEB package file

1. wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/zenoss/zenoss-stack_2.3.3_x64.deb
2. Install the DEB package file
3. sudo dpkg -i zenoss-stack_2.3.3_x64.deb

Log into the web interface

1. From another system, open a web browser
2. http://<ipaddress>:8080
3. Username: admin, Password: zenoss

Setup the Windows admin account

1. In the task pane, select Classes | Devices
2. Select the zProperties tab
3. Find the zWinPassword and zWinUser attributes and input the username and password
4. NOTE: The zWinUser should be entered as domainusername

Add your first device

1. In the task pane, select Management | Add Device
2. Enter the Device Name, and set the Device Class Path to /Server/Windows
3. Click Add Device

Devices can also be added by discovering networks, but that will be left for another day. The Zenoss installation completes in less than 30 minutes and can begin monitoring. Future todo’s include configuring email, overriding the Windows template to use WMI instead of SNMP, configuring service monitoring, creating automated responses to alerts (such as restarting services), creating a tiered monitoring environment with multiple collectors, and including additional system information in the server discovery.