Zenoss gives you a single, integrated solution for monitoring your entire infrastructure ,both network, servers, applications. They claim to support inventory, configuration, availability, performance, events of your services . Zenoss comes in a Free community edition and a different commercially supported version. It's Free version includes Availability Monitoring, Performance Monitoring , Event Management and core reporting functionality.

Zenoss likes to compare itself to both proprietary and open source tools claiming that unlike the others it is both easy to install, configure and affordable. It is more open , brings no vendor lock in and has better community collaboration. The Zenoss architecture breaks down in 3 parts. A user part with the WebConsole/Portal, a Data Layer, where all the data lives and the Process Layer that collects the data via standard protocols. Zenoss is one integrated package, not some different packages glued together into a bigger whole. You can configure templates and map instances to those templates. In the data layer Zenoss uses 3 places to store t's data, its CMDB (Configuration Management DataBase ) is an object model stored in Zope (ZODB), it is obvious that for historical data they use RRDTool and the events are being stored in a MySQL database. A nice mix and match to store everything they need ..

The actual work is done by a series of daemons and control services that provide node discovery, configuration modeling, availability monitoring, performance monitoring, event collection, and automated responses.