ivision Develops Zenoss PowerShell Module

Unifying Management Systems via PowerShell

In today’s data center, it is quite common for enterprise and SMBs to deploy multiple monitoring products to manage their heterogeneous environments; SQL Foglight for database server monitoring, System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for Windows Server monitoring and agentless solutions like LogicMonitor and Zenoss for Linux and hardware monitoring, to name a few. ivision is often engaged to consult, develop solutions and even build a tool chain to facilitate monitoring in these complex environments, and is proud to share the product of one such initiative with the community at large. Recently, we completed one such initiative using PowerShell and are proud to share the product with the rest of the IT community.

CENTRALIZED NOTIFICATIONS FOR A $2B REVENUE FINANCIAL FIRM
When one of our financial clients came to us with a request, we anticipated we’d have a little bit of coding ahead. With thousands of employees, this firm had a complex deployment of Linux and Windows machines, in multiple configurations.

TOO MANY DASHBOARDS
As a way of gathering logs, events and configuring alerts throughout the environment, they had previously installed the Zenoss Monitoring Product. Separately, the result of a previous initiative installed the SCOM Monitoring product for observing Windows machines.

The objective of the initiative was to run all of the captured SCOM Notification and Alertsthrough a system of filters to identify ticket owners and determine priority, before generating the final tickets in the Service Tracking System. Additionally, we aimed to replicate these alerts within Zenoss, as a Zenoss event, to leverage the platform’s superior dashboardi system to intake and analyze the monitoring information.

CODING A BRIDGE FROM SCRATCH
The real challenge arose when we found there were no readily-available mechanisms to create events within Zenoss, other than using an RPC endpoint, which is only cryptically described in some dusty developers’ manuals. Utilizing the scripting skills of our in-house Microsoft Cloud and Datacenter MVP, Stephen Owen, we developed a set of PowerShell cmdlets to ease the process. This module fully covers the entire life-cycle of a Zenoss event, from generation, to update, to closing, and provides detailed assistance for each and every cmdlet.

Get started with the PSZenoss PowerShell project here. To keep in touch with Stephen, follow his blog and Twitter.

For more information about ivision’s architecture and integration solution expertise, visit our technology services page.

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