Review: Zenoss 4/5

Have been runnning Zenoss for over a full year, here is my verdict:

Product (4/5):

• Monitors hundreds of nodes running of a not to beefy vm.
• Easily extendable.
• Smooth upgrades. (Not automatic but well documented.)
• User interface is sometimes a little hard to understand. Not bad for a product the size of Zenoss but not perfect either.

Documentation (4/5):

• Lots of official documentation freely available covering most of what one needs to know.
• Forums were migrated to Jive a couple of years ago leaving lots of broken links.

Community (5/5):

• Nice and helpful community.
• Lots of contributed plugins a.k.a. ZenPacks. Examples 
• Hardware health status on HP servers
• Oracle databases
• vmware ESX and ESXi

Conclusion:

I did a lot of reading up front before implementing Zenoss and considered 

• Zabbix,
• Hyperic,
• OpenNMS, 
• Nagios 

 before making the decision. I personally liked both Zabbix and OpenNMS and have heard good things about the but Nagios/Icinga and Hyperic but chose Zenoss because of 

• agent-less architecture 
• hp hardware monitoring almost out-of-the-box
• snmp trap handling.

I recently asked myself  if I'd use Zenoss again and the answer is: Yes, at least if I have to monitor hardware.

However keep in mind that a full implementation might easily take weeks even for a skilled sysadmin, depending on the size of the monitored network, the status of the network (is snmp enabled? Who has to approve it? etc.)