Zenoss Cloud Reviews

We use Zenoss Service Dynamics to monitor our customers. We use it to monitor the devices we manage, and also use it to generate reports, and alerts, and also use it for larger assets.

What I like most about Zenoss Service Dynamics is that it monitors the devices and gives close to real-time alerts. For example, in case the device is not available, Zenoss Service Dynamics generates an alert so my team can resolve the issue.

As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server.

What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor.

In my current team, I've been using Zenoss Service Dynamics for seven years. My team's always using this solution. I've also used Zenoss Service Dynamics in my previous team, so I've been using it for more than ten years.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is a very stable solution. On a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four or a five.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is a scalable solution, but every time we have new devices to monitor, we need to buy ZenPacks that may not cover every feature we need. Zenoss Service Dynamics is quite scalable, but not to the point that meets the current market for public cloud.

I wasn't the one who set up Zenoss Service Dynamics, in particular, the entire vendor system. It's a little bit complex, but in terms of setting up the agent to monitor devices, it's pretty easy. It took a week or so to set up the entire vendor system.

I wasn't familiar with the implementation strategy for Zenoss Service Dynamics because it was implemented before I joined the company.

We implemented Zenoss Service Dynamics in-house.

I've seen ROI from Zenoss Service Dynamics, in particular, my company spends on the monitoring system to provide managed service for customers, and this product is doing its job, or what it's supposed to do. My company can pick up any alert, issue, and any potential device that's down, and can address it in time, so customers stay with my company, and that's ROI to me.

There are additional costs you'll have to pay apart from the license fee for Zenoss Service Dynamics. I can't remember exactly how much my company is paying because I don't handle the finance part, but the cost is paid annually. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I'm rating the solution three out of five.

I'm not sure which version of Zenoss Service Dynamics my company is using because I don't use it for hands-on work. It's a solution I have for customers, but my company keeps the product updated with renewed license, so it's either the latest version or the version before it.

My team has its instance, apart from the instance of other teams or departments, so thousands of people use Zenoss Service Dynamics in my company. Engineers and people in operations use the solution for onboarding devices and monitoring managed devices. As for deployment and maintenance, twenty people from IT handle that for the entire company.

My advice to people looking into implementing the solution is that it's pretty good if you want to have a centralized monitoring system. It's good to use, but of course, different portals would have different features, so it would still depend on what you want. For my company, Zenoss Service Dynamics does its job, so I would recommend others to use it.

I'm rating Zenoss Service Dynamics seven out of ten. It does its job and provides the functions and features for monitoring devices. You can configure it and integrate it, so it does its job, but some features can still be added to it or improved in it, so you can start monitoring different services from different service providers.

My company just uses Zenoss Service Dynamics. It's not being sold by my company.

In one use case, a client organization launched a website for people to pay their taxes on the web.

They had a lot of crashes and a lot of troubleshooting. Then, with this solution, they can have one million users at the same time with no crashes. That's really changed the use of the platform. There's no troubleshooting, no bugs, no anything. However, on the off chance that they have something, they are directly notified by a message or a text message, so it's easier for them to deal with issues.

It's easy to use.

You can use it across various clouds (such as Azure and AWS).

Zenoss is one of the most complete monitoring tools on the market.

Technical support is good and can support in multiple languages.

The stability is good.

It can scale. 

The AI aspect needs to improve. Most of the clients go to see the competition and hear about their AI offering and this solution lacks that.  

I've been dealing with the solution since February.

It's stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The scalability is good. We won't have any issues scaling it. 

Right now, a team of ten is using the solution. The largest the team got was up to 18 or 20 people. We have IT network engineers, IT managers, and also the CIO on the product. However, most of them are really infrastructure and network engineers.

Sometimes when the company grows up and develops itself, they want to extend the solution to other departments, other subsidiaries, et cetera. There's always a chance for increased usage.

Technical support is great. In Morocco, we can get both English and French support and find them to be very helpful. 

I did not previously use a different solution. 

We also resell the Dynatrace product.

The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. 

The length of the deployment depends on the size of the infrastructure. It can go from three days to three months, something like that. The bigger the environment, the longer it takes. 

You only need one person to deploy and maintain the solution. We use an
IT expert and he delegates the smaller task to engineers, to junior engineers.

The clients don't set it up. We set it up for them. We have experts on the tool, so it's not a problem at all for us to dive in and do the implementation.

We've seen an ROI. For example, with our company, we've made two million dollars in profit in a year dealing with Zenoss.

The licensing is charged on a yearly basis. The pricing depends on the environment, the number of services, and the size of the data center. It can go from $100,000 to a million dollars.

There are some plugins that they add. For example, the APM, and the other models, we can add to the environment to meet specific needs.

I'm not usually in a position to evaluate other options. I don't handle that aspect. 

I'm a reseller. I don't use the solution personally. The technical feed is not my part. I'm just more the one who takes the meeting with the client and I leave the technical part to my partner.

There are different deployment options. For the public sector, it's generally on-premise. The banking sector is usually on the cloud. It really depends on the environment of the clients or what kind of infrastructure they have. For the cloud, typically AWS or Azure is used. 

If you have a big environment, it's really the tool that is really suitable for your environment. However, if you have a small environment, it's useless. If you have one or two services, it's just too big.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for monitoring the network infrastructure and the operator platforms. The last implementation I did was for the user experience. 

It can also be used as a data center, similar to a virtual machine. Some users use Zenoss only for seeing everything on specific types of devices. They see only certain devices like operating systems and network communications, for example.

The solution has a variety of great features.

The dashboard is excellent. With it, I can see everything from one place. It gives me a full picture of my networks and I can quickly see if there are any trouble areas to note.

The user experience is excellent.

Within the solution is a piece of software called Twill, which is very good. It's like dynamic monitoring. Twill provides a great user experience. I can put the URL from a website and I can send the user and password on that. 

Overall, it's a great solution, and I consider it to be one of the best.

The initial setup is very easy.

The product offers good documentation that helps with initial training.

If Zenoss tries to change Twill from what it is now to another kind of solution, such as Selenium or something similar, it would be nice.

It would be nice if the ZenPack could work but with fewer features. That said it's a problem not from Zenoss. It's a problem from the ZenPack itself.

There's a bit of a learning curve when you first use the solution.

The product needs to be a bit better in terms of auditing features.

It would be ideal if the product offered sound alerts. If you have, for example, 10 monitors with a lot of batch alerts and you have it working with your computer, sometimes you will see the dashboard. However, if you could listen instead, and be alerted by the noise, you can raise your head easily look at your monitor, to see the problem. That's why I put in sound within my operating system. That is the only feature that I could never find in Zenoss.

I've been using the solution for a few years at this point. I've been using the solution for two or three years now.

I had a community ZenPack that started to eat through my RAM, and I did not know why. I removed it - which was a very easy process - and then went to the official ZenPack store and put in my samples and it worked fine after that. I'm not sure why I had that initial experience. 

The scalability is very good. I can grow my site to suit any data center that I need.

I can have Zenoss in one data center, for my primary data center, and then I can deploy another one in another data center. I don't need a second Zenoss in that other machine. I use the same solution. On top of that, I can see all my devices in one dashboard for both data centers.

I can grow up very, very fast. 

We have maybe 15 users of this product in my organization.

I've only used technical support one or two times as I was having a bit of trouble with official ZenPacks. I sent an email with my case. I received a case number and the response was very fast. In less than one week, or five days, I received the new ZenPack with the features that I needed for my specific devices. The support was very good and the service was only a few days or more. In Zenoss, support is fast and strong and works very well.

I've used the solution for about a year now, and therefore I don't find the implementation to be complex. It's very straightforward, actually.

The cloud solution can be a little hard if you don't know Zenoss. However, for me, it's very simple, and I can deploy a Zenoss environment in a couple of hours. When I first started about three years ago, it could take me as long as three days.

The first step was to deploy the virtual machine.  Then you need to deploy the software, and then you need to deploy all the dashboards and all features that you need. That is a little complicated as you need to understand how Zenoss works.

Now, however, in the cloud solutions and hybrid models on cloud nodes or in side nodes, it's a little different due to the fact that you have a controller and you have the client's deployment in certain parts. Still, it's very, very easy to deploy as you put the controller software in one machine and you put the nodes in the other machines. Then, you only need to select your features. The features now are also all-inclusive.

The ZenPacks, the backup servers, are for also perfect all kinds of devices that I use.

The product offers both a community and enterprise-level version. I've deployed both.

I'm using the latest, the most updated version of the solution.

I'm an administrator of this solution within my organization.

I would recommend this solution to other organizations. I'm a big believer in the product and I've even written papers on the solution.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. I really do love the product.

As a Zenoss partner, the use cases have varied, based on the requirements. When I started using it in 2012, we were asked to migrate a set of technologies, like Windows and Linux monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, from different tools like SolarWinds and Tivoli to Zenoss, so that we would have a single pane for unified monitoring; a global operations manager. That, in turn, was integrated with ITSM tools like ServiceNow or CA. 

When I joined a different organization, it was used mostly for direct monitoring of vSphere and NetApp, with Windows and Linux of course, and some integration with SolarWinds and trap-based integrations. Internally we integrated it with ServiceNow. I implement that, integrate it, and hand it over to the daily support team.

We implement some customers on-prem and some customers we do using AWS or Azure cloud. It varies.

One of the most valuable features is the way it tries to discover technologies. It doesn't use any out-of-the-box things. It specifically uses the available, standard protocols, like TCP, UDP, WMI, and WinRM. It makes use of whatever underlying technologies are there. That is one advantage of being an agentless monitoring tool.

It has also accommodated many state-of-the-art technologies, such as Docker and ZooKeeper.

In addition, it gives you a lot of handy options to integrate with external systems.

Being Linux-based, it's easier for me to customize and co-ordinate, because I have a Linux-based background.

There is room for improvement with the administrative part. They introduced Control Center to manage things in Zenoss 5. The services that Zenoss provides remained the same, but the administrative part, since they introduced Docker, etc., has become a little complex. I know it's interesting to get new features, but it didn't add value to the customer. It made the administration task a little more complex but I have gotten used to it over the last year.

Also, application performance monitoring is an area that Zenoss has not touched much. I would like to see them focus more on this area. There is a need for application monitoring and mobile Android monitoring. If they can develop those kinds of areas that would make our business more up to date and we could cover more customers.

I've been working on Zenoss Service Dynamics since 2012. I started with Zenoss 4.2. Later I moved on and got experience with Zenoss 5. I implemented that. Right now I'm using 6.x, the latest one.

It is stable most of the way. I would rate that at eight out of 10. But it still requires more implementation and development.

I have always had satisfactory support from them. I even have some personal favorites. People there are very friendly and very responsive and they provide an on-demand service. It doesn't matter whether you are a platinum customer or what type of customer you are. They are always rational and provide solutions on time.

The setup is not straightforward because Zenoss is more like building-blocks that are given to you. They will give you all the features that are available in the technology. If you want to build something, you use your own hands, use your own brain, and build it. That is more the approach. The more you get your hands on it, the more you can mold it into anything that you want. I've seen customers — whenever Zenoss does yearly forums for the product — who are using it more efficiently than I do because they have more programming skills. 

On the other hand, that is one of the advantages that Zenoss has. They give it to you in a format so you can do anything that you decide. That is one advantage of Zenoss.

It is very cost-effective compared to the tools I worked with in the past. The company is gaining a lot with respect to the cost factor. It provides agentless monitoring and in a very cheap way.

Whenever a customer needs to monitor or manage multiple systems that need to be integrated into a single platform, and they need the cost to be very effective, I would recommend Zenoss.

I have worked on Zenoss for big, commercial enterprises, with customers who have 20,000 employees , where I have to monitor 7,000 to 14,000 CIFs. I have also worked with customers who only have 16 VMs that I need to monitor.

We are a system integrator and this is one of the solutions that we provide for our customers.

We have experience with several versions of this software, and the one we are using depends on our clients. 

We are using a lot of modules in a hybrid cloud deployment. We have used this solution in both a classical data center and a private cloud. Amazon is normally the cloud provider that we use.

Our primary use case for this solution is flexible centralized monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the flexible discovery mechanism.

I would like to see greater importance placed on the open-source version of this solution.

This solution is complex for beginners so it takes some time to learn.

The inclusion of a feature to show a graphical view of the network would be a helpful improvement.

This is a very stable solution. We have been using it for years and although it is sometimes high maintenance, it has evolved with our needs.

I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on which version is being implemented. For the versions that I have seen, the complexity is somewhere in the middle.

Compared to other solutions such as Nagios, this is the most flexible one.

My advice for anyone who is implementing this solution is to have patience because the learning curve at the beginning is steep. It is the most flexible solution of this type, but it takes time to adapt.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our environment for Zenoss Service Dynamics is custom-made. We have connected to a cloud system. On the other hand, they are more service-oriented than our data center.

The custom built integration is one of the most valuable features because you can see all the especially critical items. You can choose to ignore others or to take action. It's good when all the notifications are coming into one system. You can take action if needed.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is good at the moment. I don't see anything that needs to be improved. In terms of monitoring, they need some sort of customization options. It should be more intuitive. 

Zenoss Service Dynamics is quite complex, i.e. the number of required corrections, etc.

There was a problem with Zenoss and storage monitoring. Either this was because of some specifics of the storage hardware or some specifics of the Zenoss software. Zenoss has virtually excluded storage integration from their support.

Zenoss has built in a number of add-ons, some of them unique to their needs and some that can be customized for a particular product. Zenoss sometimes can be too complex.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is quite stable.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is working with thousands of optics. The scalability is quite good. This one is integrated with sixteen different systems.

There is a group that is defined in Zenoss Service Dynamics so anyone who is defined in the group can log into the Zenoss website for views. Most of the requests are coming directly to the sixteen systems. Maybe 50-60 or more of those are on hold by us.

Zenoss tech support answered relatively quickly. All the solutions are good. I do not have direct experience with them, but good responsiveness. They are relatively quick in response times.

Before Zenoss Service Dynamics, we previously used IBM products.

The initial setup was easy but complex. I made some investigations because of life. We were looking for other options. 

It was kind of a little challenge to configure it. It had plenty of configuration flaws. Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to define automation. It was relatively hard to manage this part.

The deployment usually is not that hard, maybe a day. The customization will take most of the time, i.e. the number of plug-ins available. In total, it's probably a month or more to install.

Zenoss Service Dynamics is a good product. They need some sort of customer issue support from the company. Whatever they need to build, we have to think about using it.

I'll give Zenoss Service Dynamics a ten out of ten. 

Its Docker Container concept is mind blowing. It is the first monitoring tool which comes with Docker features.

Now it is stable, but they should design threshold parameters in percentage instead of raw values.

Two years.

Yes.

No issues in tools.

Zenoss support is good.

It is fully dependent on costing and customer and architect.

It is straightforward.

It depends on the customer, what he wants.

Yes, I evaluate products and check all requirements before choosing it.

Before implementation, please clear all the customer requirements, then choose products accordingly.

• Very scalable
• Very customizable

• Deep integration
• Automation of processes via customizations

• Simplified installation
• Improved consistency of monitoring templates

I have been using it since 2011.

Deployment is overly complicated.

Technical support is 3/10, poor:

• Incomplete and poor documentation
• Undocumented processes
• Inconsistent solutions to problems depending on source

Setup is very complicated; pruning to desired monitors is very easy and efficient.

An internal team implemented it.

Carefully plan the partition sizes and scaling ahead of time. Don't skimp on the memory. Do not mess with the local NATing or iptables!

Paid annually for Zenoss ZSD, this solution is expensive at low-volume rates; Zenoss Core is free and meets most low-volume customer needs.

We regularly evaluate new solutions since we're an implementer in this space. Zenoss is more complex than LogicMonitor, but scalable and hugely customizable.

Carefully choose between Zenoss Core (OSS/free) and Zenoss ZSD; Core will meet most customers’ uses very well.