Zenoss is fast becoming a recognized leader for commercial open source monitoring. It offers a single model-based product to seamlessly manage physical, virtual and cloud based infrastructure. Its power lies in its flexible combination of network discovery and data presentation, and it makes an ideal partner for CFEngine’s under-the-hood self-healing technology.
CFEngine’s famous lightweight, hands-free approach to system
administration grew significantly in 2008 with the release of its Nova
product. CFEngine is designed to ensure compliance with a system model,
and one of the features CFEngine Nova added was a simple reporting
capability for the compliance level of the individual systems. So why
CFEngine and Zenoss together?
CFEngine CTO Mark Burgess explains: “CFEngine is a very focused product. It deals with automated installation and repair, with compliance-specific reporting. CFEngine’s monitoring capabilities are designed to use very focused information to provide intelligent feedback during repair. What Zenoss brings is the ability to view a wider range of devices than CFEngine is designed for. In that sense, the two products make perfect partners.”
Zenoss Community Manager Matt Ray adds, “We’ve started the integration
at a simple level to demonstrate the principle, but since both tools are
model driven and extremely flexible, we could do almost anything in the
long run. We have a number of users who have both products, so we’ll
wait and see how this first community pack gets adopted. As more users
provide feedback, we can imagine much more integration between the web
interfaces for Zenoss and CFEngine.”
Zenoss users can download the Zenoss community pack from the link below. CFEngine users will be able to add notifications directly to the Zenoss console in their system promises. For example, if you wanted to see when CFEngine repairs compliance violations for a particular system promise, you could inform Zenoss directly:
files: "/etc/passwd" comment => "Promise passwd security & tell zenoss if permissions were wrong", mode => mog("644","root","root"), action => tell_zenoss_repaired("passwd file had incorrect permissions");Burgess remarks, “Users disagree wildly about what they want to see reported. CFEngine was designed to handle situations without the need for human intervention, but many users want to see every repair anyway – we all have a need to know what is going on. Good Knowledge management is really what this is all about. By integrating two open, model-driven tools no one is making that decision for you – you can set up exactly what you need in your environment.”
Two of the most widely used Commercial Open Source products are now better able to support their overlapping communities. We wish our respective users success.
