Zenoss Plugins

Zenoss Plugins (zenplugins) consist of a collection of platform specific python libraries used by the zenplugin.py script to gather performance information on a local computer. Using an SSH enabled Command collector Zenoss can securely monitor remote servers without requiring the system administrator to install and expose an SNMP agent.

Installing and Running

Zenoss Plugins will appear alongside the other Zenoss platform downloads on the SourceForge site, and can be obtained either there or in Python's Cheese Shop.

How do I install the Zenoss Plugins?

1. standard tarball
2. the easy way

Standard

Zenoss Plugins are installed via setuptools. If you have root privileges you can install the Zenoss Plugins using the following commands:

$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ /usr/bin/zenplugin.py cpu

If you do not have root privileges setuptools allows you to install a package in a local directory structure. The following commands illustrate this process:

$ mkdir -p ~/bin
$ echo "export PYTHONPATH=${HOME}/python/lib/python2.3/site-packages" >> ~/.bashrc
$ mkdir -p ~/python/lib/python2.3/site-packages
$ python setup.py install --install-scripts=~/bin --prefix=~/python
$ ~/bin/zenplugin.py cpu

Easy

This requires that you have setuptools installed:

$ sudo easy_install Zenoss-Plugins

That command will automatically download and install Zenoss Plugins from the Cheese Shop.

Usage

The following command can be used to determine the list of supported plugins on the detected platform:

# list the plugins that are defined on the detected platform 
$ zenplugin.py --list-plugins

platform 'darwin' supports the following plugins: mem process disk

The --detect-platform option can be used to print out the platform that has been detected. It is used as follows:

# report the detected platform 
$ zenplugin.py --detect-platform

darwin

Some plugins require additional command line arguments in order to function. An example of this requirement is the disk monitor. The disk monitor plugin must be passed an argument that defines which filesystem should be reported on. Plugin arguments are provided immediately after the plugin name, as illustrated below:

# report the disk utilization for /var 
$ zenplugin.py disk /var

DISK OK;|availBlocks=14251580 usedBlocks=63512052 totalBlocks=78019632