Announcement

Release Notes for Zenoss 2.3.2

2008/12/17

These release notes contain important information about this release of Zenoss™, including:

• New features
• Where to download the software
• Supported software and environments
• Installation, upgrade, and implementation notes
• Known issues
• Defects fixed in the release
• Documentation updates
• How to report problems and provide feedback

What's New in This Release?

• For Enterprise customers, Zenoss now provides comprehensive monitoring of your VMware infrastructure. It collects performance data from VMware servers (hosts), virtual machines (guests), VMware clusters and VMware data stores. By monitoring the entire VMware stack, Zenoss provides a complete picture into VMware's performance and availability, allowing you to quickly troubleshoot VMware-related problems.
• Zenoss expands your ability to monitor Java applications with improved JMX monitoring and error reporting. Zenoss also can receive JMX events that are sent from JMX applications.
• This version of Zenoss also provides improvements to monitoring the performance and availability of Windows servers. It collects data by using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Windows Perfmon.
• Zenoss offers an expanded list of ZenPacks for download, including 30 community-contributed monitoring ZenPacks.

Downloading Zenoss Version 2.3.2

Zenoss Core 2.3.2 is available from this location:

http://www.zenoss.com/download

Zenoss Enterprise 2.3.2 is available from the Zenoss download site. Contact your Zenoss representative for more information.

Supported Software and Environments

You can install Zenoss 2.3 on one of these platforms:

• Linux®
  • RedHat® Enterprise 3, 4, 5
  • Fedora™ Core 6, 7, 8
  • Ubuntu® Server 6.06, 8.04
  • openSUSE 10.2, 10.3
  • SUSE® Enterprise 10
• Windows® (requires VMware™ Player and the Zenoss Virtual Appliance)

To run and use Zenoss 2.3, you need:

• One or more monitored targets, such as:
  • Windows server (2000 or 2003)
  • Linux or other UNIX® server
  • VMware ESX host
  • Tomcat™ or other Java/JMX server
  • Any SNMP-enabled device
• For each system that will access Zenoss through a Web browser:
  • Adobe® Flash® Player
  • Firefox 3.x, Firefox 2.x, or Internet Explorer 7
  • SSH client to facilitate command line tasks

Installation, Upgrade and Implementation Notes

Read this section for important installation, upgrade, and implementation information.

Installation

Minimum system requirements for installing the Zenoss appliance are:

• 2GB RAM
• 20 GB free disk space

Appliance Upgrade

If you see the following error when following the "conary migrate" instruction to upgrade the Zenoss Virtual Appliance image:

 

            group-zenoss-enterprise was not found on branch...

then insert

            devel//

in the string. For example, if migrating from Zenoss Enterprise Version 2.2.x to Version 2.3, enter this command:

 

 

            conary migrate --interactive --resolve group-zenoss-enterprise=/zenoss-project.zenoss.loc@zenoss:devel//enterprise-2.3

 

Upgrade Paths

Refer to the following table to determine the upgrade path you must follow when upgrading to a newer version of Zenoss.

If your current version is:	You can upgrade directly to this version:
2.1.x	2.1.3
2.1.3	2.2.4
2.2.x	2.2.4
2.2.4	2.3.2
2.3.x	2.3.2

Note: Zenoss strongly recommends that you upgrade to Release 2.3.2. When you upgrade to the latest software release, you receive the latest features and defect fixes.

Distributed Collector

• When you update your version of Zenoss or install additional ZenPacks, you should update your hubs and collectors.
• For each distributed collector you add, you must have an additional 500 MB system memory on the machine running the collector.
• If you have 2.3.1 distributed collectors, you must manually update them through the user interface before they will function correctly in 2.3.2. To do this:
  1. On the Navigation menu, click Collectors.
  2. Select the distributed collector from the list.
  3. Select Update Collector from the table menu.
  4. Click OK to update the collector.

VMware

• If you have the ZenossVirtualHostMonitor ZenPack installed, and have added VMware virtual hosts, you must delete those hosts before adding a VMware infrastructure using the new ZenVMware ZenPack.
• If you have modeled VMware ESX servers by using the ZenossVirtualHostMonitor ZenPack (meaning that you have devices under /Devices/Server/Virtual Machine Host/ESX, do not model them by using the new ZenVMware ZenPack if you want the data to persist across the upgrade.

Windows Monitoring

Zenoss recommends that monitored machines running Windows 2000 be updated with the latest Microsoft patches.

Known Issues

The following issues are known for Version 2.3.2:

• Previously collected Windows performance graph data is not available after upgrading from Version 2.2.x to Version 2.3.x. (Defect 4071)
• The VMware ZenPack cannot collect performance data if the system clocks for the Zenoss installation and VMware server are not in sync.
• ZenJMX requires Sun Java SE Version 5.0 or higher to perform correctly. If you have a different version of Java, ZenJMX appears to run but is not functional.
• Error messages from one user can appear in multiple sessions. (Defect 3992)
• In Windows 2000, logical disk performance counters are disabled by default. After Zenoss models file systems for Windows 2000, it does not gather performance data until you modify the server to enable those performance counters. To enable the performance counters, use the diskperf command on the server. For more information, read the Microsoft Knowledge Base article titled "Using Diskperf on Windows 2000" at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253251.
• When you delete a collector, its devices are left without an assigned collector. Zenoss recommends that you reassign assigned devices prior to deleting the collector.
• Log data displayed for the zenhub daemon (available from the Daemons tab for a hub) comes from the $ZENHOME/log/zenhub.log file, irrespective of whether you have configured Zenoss to direct log output to another file.

Defects Fixed in the 2.3.x Releases

The following defects were resolved in Version 2.3.2 of Zenoss.

Ticket Number	Description
3955	Add better error handling to zenpatch.
3965	SNMP v1 traps have a 0 (zero) inserted into them.
3997	zenping needs to reload its config if it defers loading its config.
4010	DifferentiateTemplates migrate step skips templates with a targetPythonClass set.
4014	Listen IP address should be configurable for zensyslog and zentrap.
4023	A traceback error is generated when a Linux device is modeled under the /Server/Cmd class.
4027	Logic to update pickle files is flawed, leading to outdated information read by zenperfsnmp on start.
4031	Missing init .py files for Modelers.
4032	The zenrender daemon does not send heartbeats.
4033	Do not allow creation of a user named "user."
4048	User interface implies monitoring of UDP services is possible.
4069	zenpop3 fails when using SSL.
4070	Legend on threshold graph points is imprecise.
4092	Event console doesn't update.
4100	zenmodeler collects all devices (rather than the single device assigned to the collector).
4110	Alert message must use field in body to appear in clear body.
4111	Some vendors require that a .0 be inserted between the enterprise and specific OIDs in V1 traps.

To view the list of defects fixed in Version 2.3.1, click this link:

http://tinyurl.com/5mxtbs

To view the list of defects fixed in Version 2.3.0, click this link:

http://tinyurl.com/6ecgkn

Documentation Corrections and Updates

This section includes release-related documentation changes and corrections that do not appear in the product documentation.

Zenoss Installation for Core Version 2.3

In the chapter titled "Chapter 1. Installing Zenoss from the Stack Installers," Step 1 is changed to:

1. Download the Zenoss installation files from the suse/ directory at http://support.zenoss.com/download.

Zenoss Administration for Version 2.3

Information has been added or changed for these topics:

• Setting Up LDAP Authentication
• ZenJMX ZenPack
• Distributed Collector

Setting Up LDAP Authentication

In the chapter titled "Chapter 32. Authentication Enterprise ZenPacks," in Section 2.2, the procedure "Setting Up LDAP Authentication" is changed to:

1. Go to: http://yourzenoss:8080/zport/acl_users/manage
2. Choose your authentication plugin, and then click Add.
3. Choose "ActiveDirectory Multi Plugin" for Microsoft Active Directory.
4. Choose "LDAP Multi Plugin" for any other LDAP server.
5. Complete the form with your LDAP credentials and paths.
   • ID - Enter a value similar to "ldapAuthentication."
   • Title - Leave this value blank.
   • Default User Roles - Set to ZenUser.
6. Click Add to save your changes.
7. Click plugins in the list of objects.
8. Click the Authentication Plugins link.
9. Move your ldapAuthentication plugin to the list of active plugins.

ZenJMX ZenPack

In the chapter titled "Chapter 26, Zenpacks," the following information about the ZenJMX ZenPack has been added:

The Attribute Path input value on the ZenJMX datasource allows you to monitor values nested in the TabularData and CompositeData complex open data objects. Using this value, you can specify a path to traverse and index into these complex data structures.

If the result of traversing and extracting a value out of the nested open data is a single numeric value, then it is automatically mapped to the datapoint in the datasource. However, if the value from the open data is another open data object, then the data point names from the datasource are used as indexes or keys to map values out of the open data.

The input value is a dot-separated string that represents a path through the object. Non-bracketed values are keys into CompositeData. Bracketed values are indexes into TabularData.

For TabularData indexes with more than one value, use a comma-separated list with no spaces (for example, [key1,key2]).

To specify a column name (needed only when the table has more than two columns), use curly brackets after the table index.

Example

To get the used Tenured Generation memory after the last garbage collection from the Garbage Collector MBean, set the Attribute Name on the datasource to lastGcInfo. Set the Attribute Path to:

 

The key memoryUsageAfterGc is evaluated against the CompositeData returned from the lastGcInfo attribute. The evaluation results in a TabularData object. Then, the [Tenured Gen] index is evaluated against the TableData, which returns a row in the table. Since a row in the table can contain multiple columns, the key value (in curly brackets) is used to pick a column in the row. Lastly, the key used is evaluated against the CompositeData in the column to return the memory value.

In this example, since the index being used for the tabular data is not a multi-value index, the column name is optional and the Attribute Path can be written as:

memoryUsageAfterGc.[Tenured Gen].used

Distributed Collector

In the chapter titled "Chapter 29. Distributed Collector," Section 4.2 (Updating a Hub or Collector) has changed to:

Any time you update your version of Zenoss or install additional ZenPacks, you should update any hubs or collectors. You do this by navigating to the Overview page for the hub or collector, and then choosing Update Hub or Update Collector from the page menu. This copies the most recent Zenoss code and ZenPacks to the server and restarts the daemons running there.

Reporting Problems and Providing Feedback

Use the Zenoss forums and Trac to submit issues and provide feedback.

If you are a Zenoss Enterprise customer, you also can contact your Zenoss representative.

Documentation Feedback

Zenoss welcomes your comments and suggestions to help us improve our documentation. Please send your comments to: docs@zenoss.com.