Creating Zenoss Zenpacks

Synopsis

ZenPacks are the extension mechanism provided by Zenoss to build new functionality and also to easily port customisation from one Zenoss server to another. Some documentation is provide in the Zenoss Developer's Guide 2.4; this paper is intended to enhance and extend that documentation, including a sample ZenPack.

The process of creating, modifying and exporting ZenPacks is discussed, along with debugging hints. The sample ZenPack explores:

creating new object classes and relationships
creating new collector modeler plugins to populate the new classes with data
creating skins to display web pages for the new types of object
creating performance data templates for the object classes

It is assumed that the reader is familiar with basic SNMP concepts and with standard Zenoss configuration techniques.

Complete paper

The paper is available as a PDF file:

Creating Zenoss Zenpacks

Note that the file is fairly large (8MB).

Supporting files

Note: these were updated for Zenoss 2.5 on 27th October 2009.

Installable Zenpack: ZenPacks.skills1st.bridge-1.0.1-py2.4.egg
Source code: ZenPacks.skills1st.bridge-1.0.1.tar