By: Bryan Irvine >>As a Zenoss user and community member I really enjoy working with the ZenPack API to create custom ZenPacks for the Zenoss Community. One recent Zenpack I created is for EMC Isilon. The ZenPack did not currently exist and because Zenoss is open source and extensible I am able to create ZenPacks that will benefit and be further enhanced by the entire community.
Here are the details about my EMC Isilon ZenPack:
What does the ZenPack for EMC Isilon do?
This ZenPack adds a modeling plugin and monitors fans, temperatures, CPU, disk performance and Input/Output Per Second (IOPS) per protocol such as NFS, SMB, etc.
Why is it impactful to my business and IT infrastructure?
We use a few monitoring tools such as the EMC native tools which are ok for day to day simple tasks but we needed a comprehensive monitoring solution that provided us one place for infrastructure and NOC Ops teams to access the full view. Our operations teams needed one guaranteed place we know will have the data in an easy to use tool with advanced alerting capabilities and reporting which is why we use Zenoss. The open source architecture of Zenoss and the ZenPack API allowed me to create the EMC Isilon ZenPack so we could leverage the benefits of Zenoss with our EMC environments quickly and with immediate impact.
What are the key capabilities of the EMC Isilon ZenPack?
With a couple clicks of a mouse you can:
* View the status of any temperature sensor within the Isilon chassis.
* View the status of any fan cooling the Isilon device.
* Monitor disk usage for storage quotas.
* Monitor disk performance such as throughput and IOPS.
* Monitor any protocol performance - easily tell what’s causing high loads coming from SMB, NFS3, NFS4, HTTP, FTP and other connections.
This ZenPack additionally models in a lot of other useful information:
* Our active EMC Isilon licenses.
* How many disks are installed, their status, the model and serial number of the disk, its logical number, which bay and chassis it’s located, firmware versions of the disk and overall disk size.
* Chassis model number and serial number.
Who developed this ZenPack and why?
I developed this ZenPack because it didn’t currently exist in the Zenoss Catalog and my team really needed it. Creating this ZenPack was easy and only took a couple of days. I am not an EMC expert and my intent was to build the basic ZenPack, release it to the Zenoss Community and allow other Zenoss users and Zen Masters to enhance my ZenPack. I’m new to Isilon and am not a storage expert and the ZenPack API made this easy to accomplish.
What is a ZenPack Anyway?
Zenoss is an open source monitoring platform that can be extended through plug-ins, called ZenPacks, that allow you to monitor a vast array of devices, applications, and systems under a single unified dashboard. ZenPacks are to Zenoss as Plug-ins are to WordPress.
ZenPacks give developers the freedom to develop monitoring solutions that extend their Zenoss managed services platform. Developers and Zenoss create and publish enterprise ready ZenPacks in a very flexible environment to support dynamic IT infrastructures.
Zenoss and ZenPacks are based on open source that enables developers to solve any monitoring challenges on a granular level.
Try The New EMC Isilon ZenPack
Bryan Irvine is a IT System Administrator at Nintendo, a member of the Zenoss Open Source Community and a guest author to the ITMonitor blog.
