Press Release

Zenoss Releases Free Cloud Computing Management Software

Open Source Community Develops Monitoring Applications for Virtualization, Google App Engine, Puppet Configuration Management and More

2010/04/22

AUSTIN, TX – APRIL 22,2010 - Zenoss Inc., corporate sponsor of the award winning open source IT monitoring and management solution Zenoss Core, today announced the release of over 10 community-developed open source cloud monitoring and virtualization management software extensions (called ZenPacks). These extensions to Zenoss Core enable users to monitor popular cloud computing applications via Zenoss’ open source management software.

The cloud monitoring software was developed as part of a Zenoss community contest and all entries were released under the GNU Public License version 2.0. The winners of the contest were chosen by a panel of active Zenoss Community members who are experts in the field of systems management. The winning ZenPacks provide in-depth monitoring for the following technologies: 

• libvirt Virtualization - The libvirt Virtualization ZenPack was the Grand Prize winner of the Zenoss in the Clouds contest and provides the foundation for monitoring a number of virtualization technologies. The ZenPack has been extensively tested with KVM, QEMU and VMware and designed to work with Xen, OpenVZ, Virtual Box, Open Nebula and other virtualization technologies.
• AMQP Event Monitor - AMQP is an open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware, frequently used in enterprise business and cloud environments as part of RabbitMQ or Apache Qpid. This monitor collects event data generated by AMQP and populates the Zenoss event database.
• Ganglia – This ZenPack monitors the open source Ganglia monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids.  The ZenPack allows you to pull monitoring information via the Ganglia protocol instead of SSH or SNMP, which should be fairly efficient.
• Google App Engine – This ZenPack is a comprehensive monitor for collecting and graphing performance and availability metrics on applications deployed on Google App Engine.
• Puppet- Monitors the status of the Puppet master daemon (an open source configuration management tool created by Puppet Labs), tracking and reporting on the status of clients and inserting new devices into Zenoss for monitoring.

"This is a great example of how open source software development allows experienced users with deep domain knowledge to improve the quality and depth of software." said Mark R. Hinkle, VP of Community at Zenoss, "Now thousands of users have access to monitor their cloud computing applications as well as contribute feedback on how to expand and improve the software in an open forum."

A special word of thanks go to Colin Hudler, David Nicklay, Jeff Schroeder and David Nalley who were the developers of much of this software and chose to donate the results of their efforts back to the Zenoss community in the form of ZenPacks.

For a complete list of all the Community ZenPacks that are available, please visit: http://www.zenoss.com/community/projects/zenpacks/

Additional information about Zenoss and cloud computing can be found in the Zenoss Cloud Computing Community.

About Zenoss Core

Zenoss Core is an award winning open source network monitoring and systems management project that delivers the functionality to effectively manage the configuration, health and performance of networks, servers and applications through a single, integrated software package. The Zenoss Community is comprised of over 75,000 active members who are instrumental in evolving the solution as well as providing timely support and help for all questions. One of the most active projects on SourceForge, Zenoss Core has been downloaded over one million times and is being used by companies in over 180 countries. The Zenoss Core project is sponsored by Zenoss Inc.,a commercial open source independent software vendor. For more information on Zenoss Core, visit http://community.zenoss.org.

About Zenoss Inc.

Zenoss is a leading commercial open source provider of Unlegacy enterprise IT management products. Zenoss Enterprise is a single model-based product that enables organizations to seamlessly manage physical, virtual and cloud based infrastructure with unprecedented power, agility and value. Leveraging a commercial open source model, Zenoss products monitor over one million network and server devices daily and have been used in over 25,000 organizations in 180 countries around the world. Commercial customers include leading companies such as Rackspace, VMware, LinkedIn, Carlson, Motorola and Deutsche Bank. To learn more about Zenoss' award-winning IT operations management software, visit http://www.zenoss.com.