You have to be careful when writing headlines. The wrong title for an article can bring a slew of readers into your site expecting one thing and getting another, and--worse--spoiling for a fight.
That was my initial reaction when I saw the headline "Linux Management and Monitoring Lacking" over on LinuxPlanet a while back. Excuse me?
Turns out the headline missed a critical word or two on the end, such as "Convergence." I know that because the Charlie Schluting piece was a re-post of the original article over on Enterprise Networking Planet, entitled "Time to Converge Monitoring and Management in Linux and Unix." Much less nerve-jangly.
In the ENP piece, Schluting argues that there's a disconnect between IT monitoring tools, such as Zenoss or Nagios, and configuration management apps like Puppet and Chef. He acknowledges that there's some "loose coupling" between these tools now, but there needs to be more.
I would suggest Schluting take a gander at ControlTier, a "cross-platform build and deployment automation framework" which will eventually enable users to automate the functionality between these services and more.
Open Sourcing Data Center Innovation: Another innovative direction for the data center can be found in the launch of the Open Data Center Initiative. The news actually came out in a Statement of Support on the first of the month, stealthily covered by the industry's
Green Data Center Blog. Fortunately, Michael Manos, Sr. VP of Digital Realty Trust, decoded the news in his LooseBolts blog later last week.
In a nutshell, the new project will apply open source collaborative methods to data-center design, both in software and hardware. I, for one, will be very interested to see what comes out of this project.
O'Reilly Gets Its Online Irish On: Those of you interested in web operations as a broader concept, take note: O'Reilly's free
Velocity Online Conference is kicking off in just over a week. The online event will take place from noon-2:15 p.m. EST (1700-1915 GMT) on March 17. Registration is free, and you won't even have to wear green.
Zenoss Core Moves Forward: As you may have read elsewhere, Zenoss announced the release of Zenoss Core 2.5.2, which will include "monitoring capabilities for the Xen Hypervisor via the Zenoss Xen monitoring plug-in, or Xen Virtual Hosts ZenPack." If you have any interest in virtual management, check out the new GPL release today.
Another new contribution to Zenoss was announced last week by Allen Sanabria, who's put together a script to automatically add multiple datapoints to Zenoss all at once, instead of one at a time. Sanabria claims the script for the Zenoss API is not finished yet, but Zenoss users may find it useful now.