The installation guide didn't say that it was running on port 8080, so after figuring that out with lsof, we're presented with a login page. The account created during the install actually works! Hey, you don't take anything for granted with software, especially if you're bruised and battered from living in the OSS world for many years. Pleasantly surprised, it's time to look around and see what this thing can do.

Clicking around aimlessly is certainly fun, but not recommended with Zenoss. Without at least at least a partially understanding of Zenoss, it is nearly impossible to make sense of the configuration options. A casual user clicking around will be able to find devices and information about them with ease, but a Zenoss administrator will become frustrated. Documentation, to the rescue.

After reading the guide, it became clear that everything is organized into Classes. There are other organizational components, like Systems, Locations, and Groups, but fundamentally, devices end up in a Class. We recommend you ignore everything but classes for now.

We added some devices manually, most important servers first. The only required information was the hostname and Class the device belongs to, and ta-da, Zenoss fired off a discovery process and began enumerating the first server. This worked wonderfully, and before long we could see network interfaces (and utilization graphs), performance graphs of CPU, memory and some other great tidbits of information. Since Zenoss was told this was a Solaris server, and its Production State is "Production," we already begin to see the benefits of having our devices in Zenoss. Under /Devices/Server/Solaris, all Solaris servers will live, and provide an easy access point to information.

Before adding a device, it must be SNMP capable. If you don't already have NET-SNMP installed and running on all your servers, now is a good time to start. It is quick to configure a read-only community and enable it on most operating systems. Once SNMP is enabled, feel free to add more devices, or, alternatively, go crazy.

Next: Unleashing Zenoss Discovery, Playing Around »