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!