Zenoss Core - Enterprise IT Monitoring

Release Notes for Zenoss Core Version 4 (Alpha) Copyright (c) 2012 Zenoss, Inc., All rights reserved. Redistribution or duplication of any portion of this document is prohibited without the express written consent of Zenoss, Inc. Zenoss and the Zenoss logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Zenoss, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, logos, and service marks are the property of Zenoss or other third parties. Use of these marks is prohibited without the express written consent of Zenoss, Inc. or the third-party owner. Ext JS is a registered trademark of Sencha, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Flash is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. MySQL and Java are registered trademarks of the Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Python is a trademark or registered trademark of the Python Software Foundation. Tomcat is a trademark of the Apache Software Foundation. RabbitMQ is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other companies and products mentioned are trademarks and property of their respective owners. Part Number: 00-012012-4.2-v01 About These Notes These release notes contain important information about the Alpha release of Zenoss Core 4 including: New features Where to download the software Supported software and environments Update information and known issues Reporting problems and providing feedback What's New? This version of Zenoss Core offers new features and improvements in the following areas: New messaging framework (RabbitMQ) to allow for horizontal scaling of event processing, and to ease northbound integration New system requirements, including Python 2.7 and MySQL 5.5.13 or higher RelStorage, which replaces ZEO and improves the performance of Zope object database queries Scalability improvements to zenperfsnmp Latest Ext JS 4 framework Significant improvements to the event processing system, increasing to 100M+ events per day Advanced user configuration options in the interface Improvements to published JSON API examples, including the introduction of a Python client library Zenoss Core now stores session information in a persistent database, which is created in MySQL Queuing mechanism that allows separation of event processing, horizontal scaling, and the ability to subscribe to event queues for custom processing REST API for querying events Previous alerting framework replaced with more robust, real-time triggers and notifications Support for SNMPv3 traps Ability to monitor devices directly over IPv6 All performance collecting daemons have moved to the collector framework for more consistent operation and higher reliability. Generate ping performance information for devices and interfaces. nmap-based zenping to provide faster and more resilient event suppression Downloading Zenoss Core Zenoss Core is available from this location: http://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss/files/zenoss-alpha Warning You should not run this Alpha release in a production environment. Supported Software and Environments You can install Zenoss Core on these platforms: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 CentOS 5 (verified with CentOS 5.7) Windows (requires VMware Player and the Zenoss Virtual Appliance) Adobe Flash Player 10 or later version One of these browser versions: Firefox (verified with version 8) Internet Explorer (verified with versions 7, 8, 9) Chrome (verified with version 15) The following partial list of resources can be managed by Zenoss Core: Windows Server (2000, 2003, 2008), Windows XP, and Windows Vista, Windows 7 Linux or other UNIX server OpenStack Tomcat and other Java/JMX servers Any SNMP-or SSH-enabled device Installation, Upgrade and Implementation Notes Read this section for important installation, upgrade, and implementation updates. For complete installation and update instructions, refer to the latest versions of the installation documentation. Upgrade Upgrades are not officially supported with the Alpha release of Zenoss Core 4. If you would like to assist Zenoss with testing the upgrade process, please upgrade from your Zenoss 3.2.x non-production environment. Zenoss does not test or evaluate community, customer-developed, and custom ZenPacks for upgrades. If you are using one or more ZenPacks that are not installed through the standard Zenoss installation process, you should contact the ZenPack author about its compatibility with your upgrade version. Zenoss further recommends you test the ZenPack for upgrade compatibility in a test environment. Zenoss Core includes a fully redesigned event processing and storage system. At this time, upgrades will not automatically migrate events from Zenoss 3.2.x. A new, empty event table is created in the new schema after upgrade. Updating Custom ZenPacks Custom ZenPacks must be compatible with Python 2.7. You must upgrade custom ZenPacks with Python 2.7-compiled extensions. If you have a custom ZenPack running on Zenoss 3.2.x that includes alerting rules with custom actions, then you must modify the ZenPack before you can use it with Zenoss Core. Otherwise, the system will produce warning messages similar to this: WARNING:zen.migrate: <rule>: Successfully migrated rule to Trigger, but was unable to create a Notification -rule has invalid or unknown action type: <action> You must add the following code to your custom ZenPack, in configure.zcml: <configure xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"> <utility factory=".actions.MyAction" provides="Products.ZenModel.interfaces.IAction" name="my_action"/> </configure> Read the IAction class declaration in $ZENHOME/Products/ZenModel/interfaces.py for documentation of the attributes and methods your action needs to implement. Add the following code to actions.py in your custom ZenPack: class MyAction(IActionBase): implements(IAction) id = 'my_action' name = 'My Action' actionContentInfo = ICommandActionContentInfo def execute(self, notification, signal): ... def updateContent(self, content=None, data=None): ... Note that the name attribute in the configure.zcml file matches up to the id attribute in the actions.py file. Examples of implementing actions are in $ZENHOME/Products/ZenModel/actions.py, which declares four core actions: email, page, command, and trap. Event Console Filtering Event console filtering behavior in Zenoss Core 4 is different than that of Zenoss 3.2.x, as follows: Regular expressions are not supported when filtering by device or component. In device/component fields, if you enclose a query in double quotes, it searches for that device or component by using an exact match search (fastest). For example, searching for "abc" matches abc, but not abcd or babc. For more information about event console filtering, see the chapter titled "Using Zenoss Core" in Zenoss Core Administration. IPv6 Zenoss Core can model and monitor IPv6-addressed devices by using SNMP, Telnet or SSH. Ping monitoring is also supported for IPv6. Zenoss Core installation (and communications links among its processes) must continue to be over IPv4. This includes all links between local or distributed ZenHubs and collectors, and Zenoss Core dependencies (such as RabbitMQ). When adding a new device to Zenoss Core, the DNS resolution of the device name dictates whether it attempts to connect by using IPv4 or IPv6. If you enter an IP address directly (either as a device name or by manually changing a device's management IP), then Zenoss Core can be forced to use IPv4 or IPv6 manually. If you want to monitor devices in your infrastructure that have IPv6 addresses, make sure you have installed and configured an IPv6 interface on your Zenoss Core server. ZenHub This release of Zenoss Core uses RelStorage, a backend for ZODB that stores pickles in a relational database. With the switch to RelStorage, the pcachesize and pcachedir options are no longer relevant. Remove these options from any daemon configuration (.conf) files. (Internal Defect 28620) Reports The process for determining device state has changed for the Availability report. Previously, if an event was reported that indicated a device down condition before the start of the report window, this event would not be seen, and the device would be considered 100% available. The Availability report now looks for all open events reported before or during the reporting window, and computes availability by using the device state based on prior open events. Event Commands and Alerting Rules Do not escape event command messages and event summaries. For example, write this command as: ${evt/ summary} (rather than echo '$evt/summary'). (Internal Defect 28755) Alerting rules or event commands that perform starts or ends with queries on the ntevid field, or perform comparisons against a non-numeric ntevid field, cannot be migrated to the equivalent Zenoss Core 4 trigger rule. These alerting rules or event commands must be manually migrated to the appropriate trigger after installation. (Internal Defect 28818) Debug Logging from zeneventd To enable debug logging for zeneventd, you must run zeneventd with the -v10 option. (Internal Defect 28626) zeneventd start -v10 Known Issues The following issues are known for this version of Zenoss Core. ZenPacks The definitions of the Text and TextLine schema have changed. Any ZenPacks that use Text or TextLine in their interface definitions must be updated. Text is now TextLine, and TextLine is now Text. An example about how to preserve compatibility with 3.x ZenPacks is available in the ZenPackTemplate GitHub repository (https://github.com/zenoss/ZenPackTemplate/blob/master/CONTENT/interfaces.py). (Internal Defect 28507) The zope.app namespace was deprecated by Zope and has been removed. Zenoss Core includes a backwards compatibility layer, but any references in ZenPacks to zope.app.* should be changed to zope.* instead. (Internal Defect 28930) ZenPacks are not installed on the Virtual Appliance (Internal Defect 29997) Site Window Portlet Some Web sites may not be compatible with the Site Window (Welcome) portlet that appears on the Dashboard. Before customizing this portlet to point to another Web site, make sure that site is not running a JavaScript "frame breaker" script. (Internal Defect 27151) The Site Window (Welcome) portlet references information related to the Zenoss Service Dynamics product. (Internal Defect 29996) Internet Explorer 9 When using Internet Explorer 9, Zenoss Core user interface page elements may not load and display correctly. To work around this issue, go to the Internet Options Advanced tab (from Settings > Internet Options), and then reset Internet Explorer settings. Reports After upgrade, reports may not display correctly for users with no assigned roles. (Internal Defect 28822) To work around this issue, re-index the catalog with the command: zencatalog --reindex User Preferences Some user preferences, such as grid column and window resizing, are not saved after upgrading to the current version. (Internal Defect 29846) Reporting Problems and Providing Feedback Use the Zenoss forums (http://community.zenoss.org/community/forums) and Trac (http://dev.zenoss.org/trac) to submit issues and provide feedback. To facilitate rapid product version improvements, Zenoss is sponsoring a "bug hunt" competition. To learn more about participating, visit: http://community.zenoss.org/blogs/zenossblog/2012/02/08/hunt-bugs-will-travel Zenoss welcomes your comments and suggestions to help us improve our product documentation. Please send your comments to: docs@zenoss.com