Specifications

74 | august 2008 www.linuxjournal.com
list and selecting Manage→Change Class.
If all has gone well, so far we have a functional SNMP
monitoring system that is able to monitor heartbeat/availability
(Figure 2) and performance information (Figure 3) on our sys-
tems. You can customize other various Status and Performance
Monitors to meet your needs, but here we will use the default
localhost monitors.
Creating Users and Setting E-Mail Alerts
At this point, we can use the dashboard to monitor the man-
aged devices, but we will be notified only if we visit the site.
It would be much more helpful if we could receive alerts via
e-mail. To set up e-mail alerting, we need to create a separate
user account, as alerts do not work under the admin account.
Click on the Setting link under the Management navigation
section. Using the drop-down arrow on the menu, select Add
User. Enter a user name and e-mail address when prompted.
Click on the new user in the list to edit its properties. Enter a
password for the new account, and assign a role of Manager.
Click Save at the bottom of the page. Log out of Zenoss, and
log back in with the new account. Bring the settings page
back up, and enter your SMTP server information. After setting
up SMTP, we need to create an Alerting Rule for our new user.
Click on the Users tab, and click on the account just created in
the list. From the resulting page, click on the Edit tab and
enter the e-mail address to which you want alerts sent. Now,
go to the Alerting Rules tab and create a new rule using the
drop-down arrow. On the edit tab of the new Alerting Rule,
change the Action to email, Enabled to True, and change the
Severity formula to >= Warning (Figure 4). Click Save.
The above rule sends alerts when any Production server
experiences an event rated Warning or higher (Figure 5). Using
a filter, you can create any number of rules and have them
apply only to specific devices or groups of devices. If you want
to limit your alerts by time to working hours, for example, use
the Schedule tab on the Alerting Rule to define a window. If
INDEPTH
Figure 1. Adding a Device into Zenoss
Figure 2. The Zenoss Dashboard
Figure 3. Performance data is collected almost immediately after discovery.
Figure 4. Creating an Alert Rule