Zenoss, the Book , the review

Kris Buytaert — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:39:20 +0000

As mentioned earlier , Packt sent me their Zenos Core Network and Systems Monitoring by Michael Badger to review.

So I spend the past couple of weeks trying to crawl my way trough it. Not that there was any problem with the book, more with my schedule :) I was hoping to finish it some time ago but time was working against me, even last week when my flight back from Zurich was a bit shorter than planned I couldn't finish reading the book.

But yesterday I managed, Michael managed to write a good book on a hot topic during what was probably one of the most busy of his life.

In 8 chapters Michael manages to explain the different aspects of Zenoss fairly well, he even touches the creation of ZenPacks and extending Zenoss in general also.

It was a fairly good read and showed me a couple of new insights into Zenoss.

However although Zenoss is heavily SNMP based there is little information on SNMP in general and MIB more in detail ? People really new to systems monitoring might want to have a couple of more pages on these topics.

For those not familiar to Zope the mentioning of TALES expressions might also raise some eyebrows, luckily there has been a full Appendix dedicated to it.

Time permitting I would have hoped he could of gone a bit more in detail on creating a ZenPack that did a bit more than checking the status of a page. Looking into the status of an Apache or MySQL or other relevant daemon , or the Squid internal statistics

But if you are new to Zenoss and you want to have a quick headstart into monitoring your infrastructure with it this book is a really really good start.

There's a free preview Chapter at Scribd.com and also at Packt

Everything is a Freaking DNS problem - bookreview

Zenoss, the Book , the review