Zenoss Server Monitoring Tool Review
Zenoss Server Monitoring is a solid option for those looking for an IT monitoring platform that can analyze multiple classes of IT assets including servers, applications and networking components. It’s a good choice for organizations looking for broad server and IT service infrastructure monitoring across both on-premises and cloud deployments.
Troubleshooting is a strong point and key differentiator for Zenoss monitoring, thanks to the optional Zenoss Service Impact module that can help to correlate the impact of different services on application delivery.
Zenoss monitoring, like several other options for server monitoring, is an open source-based IT management solution. While the Zenoss Core community project is the open source effort, Zenoss Service Dynamics is the commercial on-premises offering providing enterprise features and Zenoss Cloud provides a hosted deployment.
In contrast to many other server monitoring vendors that have an open source project, there is no upgrade path between Zenoss Core and the enterprise platform. Additionally, some users have found the installation process for Zenoss Service Dynamics to be complex.
Zenoss Service Description
Zenoss Service Dynamics and Zenoss Cloud support a wide array of on-premises and cloud infrastructure monitoring capabilities and have a powerful engine that is able to auto-discover devices.
ZenPacks provide easy integration with different hardware and applications for easy monitoring. Among the server hardware ZenPacks supports are options for Dell PowerEdge, HP Proliant and IBM Power servers.
Zenoss monitoring offers two support tiers:
- Professional – for smaller environments, with up to three months of data retention.
- Enterprise – for larger environments, with 15 months of data retention.
Zenoss Core Features
These are key Zenoss core features that will give full visibility into your network.
Server Hardware Monitoring
Administrators can monitor multiple components on a server system including, processors, memory, fans and physical disks.
Blade Server Monitoring
Zenoss enables users to identify blade server enclosures and the components that are in them, including management consoles.
Event Management
Events are collected to help map the relationship between server components and service impact.
Capacity Planning
Resource utilization and capacity planning to help identify when systems are overtaxed.
Server operating system monitoring
Monitoring of Linux, Microsoft Windows, HP-UX, IBM AIX and OracleSolaris information as well as CPU utilization.
Zenoss Monitoring Pros and Cons
Pros
Zenoss Cloud is a SaaS platform, but the company also offers on-premises options to serve organizations with any network architecture. The Zenoss product allows users to create custom triggers and notifications when events occur. The platform can also execute commands in response to events to resolve some issues.
Cons
The interface is not as intuitive as other server monitoring solutions and does have a steep learning curve. However, Zenoss does provide a good amount of documentation to get up and running.
How Much Does Zenoss Monitoring Cost?
Zenoss does not list their prices on their website but you can contact them for a quote.
Zenoss |
|
Workload Support |
Cloud and on-premises |
Delivery
|
Cloud SaaS platform (Zenoss Cloud), and on-premises (Zenoss Service Dynamics) |
Key Differentiator |
Service impact and root-cause isolation; blade server monitoring |
Pricing |
Available on request from Zenoss |
See the full list of top server monitoring software
This article was updated in April 2021 by Kyle Guercio.