About a year ago I was playing around with Zenoss 3 as we were exploring the options for resource usage reporting. Had a go with Zenoss, Splunk, and some other solutions. In the end, we decided to go for something else, a more ‘commercial’ solution fit and worthy for an ‘enterprise’.
Since then, Zenoss has launched a new version which is Zenoss 4. Our ‘commercial’ solution is moving along but is not quite done. In the meantime, I want to come up with a quick monitoring dashboard so that I can do my job (system administration) better. So, I decided to have another go with Zenoss.
First, let’s start with reading the installation guide and see what the requirements are.
Requirement number one: Zenoss runs on RHEL/Centos. Good, I like rpm-based linux.
Requirement number two: Hardware.
| Deployment Size | Memory | CPU | Storage |
| 1 to 250 devices | 4GB | 2 cores | 300GB, 10K RPM or SSD |
| 250 to 500 devices | 8GB | 4 cores | 300GB, 10K RPM or SSD |
| 500 to 1000 devices | 16GB | 8 cores | 300GB, 15K RPM or SSD |
Ok, I will probably use this on 200+ devices, so I think I will need 6GB and 2 cores.
Requirement number three: Non-journaled filesystem for RRD files that will be located in /opt/zenoss/perf.
The Zenoss installation guide contains installation instructions for RHEL5 and RHEL6. I am going to install CentOS 6.4 as that is the latest version to date.
Prerequisites for CentOS 6 according to the installation guide:
- SELinux is disabled (I don’t like this.)
- Directory /opt/zenoss is not a symlink to another location
- umask is set to 022
- /home directory is writable by root (or /home/zenoss exists as user zenoss’s home directory)
- connected to the internet
- DNS is available
Software prerequisites for CentOS 6 according to the installation guide:
| Prerequisite | Version |
| Oracle Java | 1.6 Update 31 (NOT 1.7) |
| RRDtool | 1.4.7 or later |
| MySQL Community Server | 5.5.25 through 5.5.28 |
| RabbitMQ | 2.8.6 or later |
| Nagios Plugins | 1.4.15 or later |
| Erlang | R12B |
Further into the guide, there are detailed information on how to install Oracle Java, RRDtool, MySQL Community Server, and RabbitMQ. However, nothing was written about Nagios Plugin or Erlang,
A quick google search reveals that nagios-plugins can be installed using yum, but it will involve a third-party repository, which I am uncomfortable doing. Erlang looks like it will be installed together with RabbitMQ, but I cannot be certain at this point.
I am quite disappointed with the installation guide, but hey, that’s what you get with free things.
This hiccup brings me back to the Zenoss website. Hey what’s this? An auto-deploy script? Ok, let’s use this instead.
This will be continued on the next post.