Facts

• 8 Chapters, 116 pages with an RRP of $34.99 US / £31.99 UK
• The book is aimed at anyone who wants to manage a network using Cacti. No previous Cacti or Linux experience is needed

Pros

• The book is ideal for someone who has never used a Linux or Cacti system before. It’s an ideal introduction to Cacti.
• The instructions and illustrations are clear and concise, with no room for misinterpretation
• Provides a good introduction to data, host and graph templates and how to use them.

Cons

• The book is filled with poor sentence structure and typos. Given that PACKT had someone review the writing and correct mistakes, this is a real shame.
• The book makes frequent and consistent spelling mistakes. For example, the book constantly refers to Tobi Oetiker as Tobi Oeticker
• The first 46 pages (of 116) cover what SNMP and rrdtool are and how to install Cacti. Given the book is so short, this seems a waste when a simple aptitude install cacti would have covered it.
• 10 pages on user management really is a waste. If you can’t figure out how to create a user on your own you really shouldn’t be setting up the network monitoring system for your organization.

Conclusion

I’m in two minds about this book. On the one hand it’s full of typos and poor English. It doesn’t go into much depth in the areas I wanted it to (Cacti XML Queries and data templates) but spends a long time on simple tasks (installing and basic configuration). On the positive side the book does provide a good introduction to SNMP and how to get started with Cacti.

All considered I think the book is suitable for someone who is looking at implementing Cacti but shouldn’t be considered a complete guide. One to avoid if endless typos are likely to get on your nerves.

The books eleven chapters cover everything from basic installation to extending Zenoss:

1. Introduction
2. System Architecture
3. Installation and Set up
4. The Zenoss User Interface
5. Device Management
6. Status and Performance Monitors
7. Event Management
8. System Reports
9. Settings and Administration
10. Extend Zenoss
11. Technical Support

Having read through the book, I would recommend it to the following groups of people:

• Zenoss implementers, people who are looking to implement Zenoss for a SMB.
• Zenoss users, people who use Zenoss as part of their role. The book makes a superb handbook

The book is well presented, with well written introductions and summaries for each chapter. Many of the technical books I read seem to struggle with the balance between text and screen shots, this is not the case here. The balance is perfect.

Michael Badger (the author) creates a sample company known as Mill Race and guides the reader through setting up their monitoring solution. Because of this, it’s easy to transpose the information to your environment.

The value in the book for me was getting a firm understanding on the terminology used in Zenoss (Class, Template, Group, Modeling etc) and that I am now able to produce more meaningful reports.

So, to conclude. Zenoss Core, Network and System Monitoring is an essential read if you use (or plan to use) Zenoss and want a good understanding of all aspects of Zenoss.

Cacti is great for monitoring SNMP hosts and has some incredible graphing abilities. The problem I had with Cacti is simply that there’s no useful OS error monitoring. So, there became a requirement for either a replacement or additional monitoring system.

This was where System Center Essentials came in. It had the promise of SNMP monitoring, windows agent support and other goodies. Unfortunately even with SP1 the performance was poor and I was frequently plagued with meaningless alerts (to which the Microsoft solution was to filter them out). SNMP reporting was so poor that SCE just had to go.

I then came across Zenoss, so far it looks really swish. It has a nice user interface, SNMP graphing and WMI interaction with windows hosts – meaning full event log monitoring. Check out the screenshots below and then go and take a look at their website!