To quote Tom Limoncelli, "It's not a service if you aren't monitoring it." A decade ago, monitoring effectively meant either cobbled together, home-grown scripts or massive and inflexible enterprise applications. In the intervening time, monitoring has become a must-have for even the smallest environment, the hodgepodge collection of scripts has grown to become unmaintainable, and the massive enterprise applications, while working well, are slow to respond to the changes happening everywhere. In that interim, monitoring with open source software has effectively become the de facto standard, because, like the browser and operating system, monitoring is now a commodity.
Zenoss is free/libre open source software for monitoring applications, networks, servers, and even whether the restroom is in use.
Who should attend:
Sysadmins and managers who are planning to use or are evaluating Zenoss as a monitoring platform, and those who are nascent in their exploration of systems/network monitoring. Sysadmins experiencing scaling/scope issues with other tools such as RRDtool or Nagios will walk away learning much. Participants are expected to be relatively well versed in operating system and application mechanics.
Take back to work:
A good grasp of the basics of Zenoss and monitoring theory and the ability to put this information to use immediately, along with a rudimentary understanding of some of the more esoteric features Zenoss offers.
