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Zenoss Announces Release of Zenoss Core 2.5, New Free Training Event, and More

I'm beginning to think the folks at Zenoss never sleep. How else can the popular open source network monitoring software vendor explain all the recent announcements and news they've been making the last few days? Let's start with the contest.

The new Community ZenPack Contest captures the cloud computing craze. "Zenoss in the Clouds ZenPack Contest" is aimed at users who want to create modules, or ZenPacks, to allow Zenoss to monitor cloud infrastructureand service providers, or deploy cloud-based technologies.

Zenoss Community Manager Matt Ray says, "We’re looking for as many useful submissions as possible, monitoring something not yet covered, improvements to existing ZenPacks or extending Zenoss to provide new functionality.  It doesn’t have to be overly complex, but don’t let that stop you from going wild. There are a lot of ZenPacks that are being tested or have yet to been submitted to Zenoss for hosting, so this contest is your chance to show off your chops and possibly win a great prize.  To help foster the discussion we've created a new Zenoss-Cloud forum."

The Grand Prize winner receives $2000, an four runners-up will win $500 each. Multiple entries are allowed, but the contest only runs until february, so get to work!

Zenoss Core 2.5 Now Available

The latest version of the open source monitoring and systems management software, Zenoss Core 2.5, is now available for free download from the Zenoss Community Web site.

New features include new monitoring tools for Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), including dynamic performance snapshots and the ability to drill down on performance issues with "inside-the-instance" monitoring. Zenoss Core 2.5 also includes more than 40 community developed ZenPacks, a re-designed Event Console, and numerous bugfixes and a slew of smaller feature requests.

Free Training at Zenoss Community Day

The second Zenoss Community Day must have been a smash hit, because a third event is already scheduled to take place during the USENIX 23rd Large Installation Systems Administrator Conference (LISA) (!) on November 6, 2009. The free event includes instructor-led training and time for networking and community discussion. Registrations are being taken on a first come, first served basis, but there are still a few slots left.

Mark Hinkle, Zenoss VP of community, told me ahead of the last event that he learns a lot from the user community at these training days. "Sometimes they really surprise us, recently at the Atlanta Linuxfest one of our users, a large hosting company, was very creative in the way they auto-generated reports and emailed PDFs of their user's hosted account usage. Sometimes our community members extend Zenoss in ways we never thought and even teach us a thing or two."

Zenoss is conducting its fourth annual Open Source Systems Survey during the training event and plans to query attendees about their usage and plans for open source system management software. If you want your chance to be heard, but would rather take the survey online, you can. All participants can opt-in to receive the survey results if they choose.

• survey
• contest
• Zenoss
• network monitoring
• LISA
• core 2.5

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