Zenoss ZenTech Community

I've been tasked with investigating the work involved in moving from our current Zenoss 4.2.5 to Zenoss 6.x and am struggling to find information on some aspects of it.

This move is partly being prompted by the fact that Zenoss 4 is based on Centos 6.x and the powers that be would like us to move to Centos 7 for various reasons.

On the offchance… Has anyone ever tried getting Zenoss 4 to run ok on Centos 7? Or is this out of the question..

I've got a test 6 box stood up on my local machine using the master ova for playing around with and testing zenpacks.

So far in my experimentation with 6.x I noticed the following underlying components have changed… any others I've not spotted yet?

Is there any sort of nice handy Zenoss document detailing the changes from 4 to 6?

I've got several custom zenpacks that use rrdtool, which now don't install as rrdtool is no longer present, is there any guidance out there of what this has been replaced with (metric façade?) and how to use it?

I've also got some custom portlets in Zenoss 4 and it looks like the portlet system has been rewritten – again is there any guidance as to how to add portlets into the new system?

(Our environments that we monitored are not large really (300 devices or less mostly) and so the forum wisdom I've read would suggest that staying with a stable version of Zenoss 4 would be wise, but unfortunately the Centos 6 issue may mean those making the decisions force a move…)

Subject:	RE: Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Jad Baz
Posted:	2019-03-28 07:12

I'm currently going through the same transition.
However, I'm doing a lot of custom things with zendmd and for that reason, the project was much much harder than expected
For you, it will probably be much easier

But I must say that I'm running into lots of issues as well (this, this and this). And for that, I advise you to hold off as much as you can
And you might think of maybe even looking at another tool altogether...

In any case you might want to check out my post from last October: Key questions to consider upgrading from Zenoss 4 to 6

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Jad
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Subject:	RE: Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Pheripheral Pheripheral
Posted:	2019-03-28 12:07

Hi,

Thanks for the response.

Yes, I've browsed around the forum and picked up the general consensus that this is a hard transition and staying with 4.2.5 is often the most sensible path, but the actual decision on whether we move isn't mine unfortunately.

A couple of our ZenPacks are quite niche and plug stright into to various zenoss code calls and currently don't work out of the box with 6 so i'll be going through the pain of trying to fix those should we move.

There is also a decent chance the pain of the move might bring forward ideas of moving to another monitoring tool altogether...

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Pheripheral Pheripheral
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Subject:	RE: Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Sam Urai
Posted:	2019-11-05 23:13

I'm in the same situation.. been asked to see how feasible the migration from 4.2.5 to 6.3.2 . We have been forced to migrate as 4.2.5 have some CVEs and only support RHEL/CentOS 6.x.

Going through the guides. It does seem a heck of the task and a bit complex. Have you or anyone else has done the migration like this successfully with the Community edition?

If someone could share the experience, pros/cons of 6.3.2, that would be helpful to decide if it is worth to do the migration or look for another tool..

Is there any other good open source tool available for snmp trap handling that would be a good alternative to Zenoss?

Thanks

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Sam
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Subject:	RE: Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Larry
Posted:	2020-01-31 01:39

Hi Sam,
We recently migrated from 4.2.5 to 6.2.1 (community edition). We are doing some cleanup of 4.2.5 right now, but the 6.2.1 install went live two weeks ago. Overall I like 6.2.1 a lot better. The console and graphs are modern. Good luck with your migration!

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Larry
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Subject:	RE: Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Jane Curry
Posted:	2020-02-05 05:46

Hi Larry,
Thanks for all your recent posts - especially those with ANSWERS!

It's a big ask, but if you can document some of your migration steps, I think there are many who would appreciate them.

I have helped a couple of people do the move but it has always been, effectively, a start-again approach.

zenbatchdump / zenbatchload is a great tool for moving devices / device classes / Groups / Systems / locations with the added benefit of being able to edit the files before doing the load, so potential for clean-up en route.

I use the trick of creating a migration ZenPack to get things like:
Local profiles
Commands
Event customisation
Service definitions
Process definitions (with care or you get all your instances as well as the definitions)

out from one environment and in to the other.

Anything that needs RRD is probably a dead-duck as that has gone entirely from Zenoss core (that's both core and Core :) )
I have had reasonable success with standard ZenPacks behaving in a similar fashion but beware that many have been
rebuilt on top of the zenpacklib ZenPack and some older community ZenPacks (many of mine, for instance) were built with the zenpacklib utility. I was assured that the two types of zenpacklib support should co-exist - but that is a long time back now so caveat emptor.

I did have a go at building Zenoss Core 4.2.5 with latest Sup on to a CentOS 7 and never get there - didn't have time to try very hard but, in response to an earlier post, no I haven't done it.

I note with horror that someone at Zenoss thought fit to completely replace the Install Zenoss page from the wiki ( http://wiki.zenoss.org/Install_Zenoss ) so that it only points to the official stuff and to Sergei's ansible approach. The old page that references Zenoss 4.2.5 and the autodeploy script can be found in the history of that page at http://wiki.zenoss.org/index.php?title=Install_Zenoss&diff=17191&oldid=17130 .

And I'm sorry, but I still don't like 5/6 because of the lack of documentation / support for the dockerised environment. The administrative overhead of finding the right containers, connecting to them, and getting anything in or out of them, is horrible. If things never go wrong or you never need to work on ZenPacks then the user experience may well be better on post-4.2.5 but not for admins, especially in an environment where you do not need to scale beyond a single Zenoss server.

Another of my 2 pennorth ;)

Cheers,
Jane

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Jane Curry
Skills 1st United Kingdom
jane.curry@skills-1st.co.uk
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Subject:	RE: Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Larry
Posted:	2020-03-19 18:46

Hi Jane,
Thanks for all that you shared. I completely agree with you about the lack of documentation for Zenoss 5/6. It is very frustrating.

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Larry
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Subject:	RE: Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Laurent Hemeryck
Posted:	2020-04-03 07:15

Hello,

If that can help anyone. I have written my own scripts to export and import the configuration by subset (devices, templates, triggers, notifications, services, ...). Not everything is 100%, but pretty much close to it. Of course, there's no guarantee.

If you really ask for it, Zenoss can only provide you with a ZenPack to export and import some data, but I found it a bit difficult to use and there's no possibility (at least easily) to review the settings and correct them if needed.

Cheers,

Laurent

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Laurent Hemeryck
Monitoring Engineer
FedNot
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Subject:	Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc...
Author:	Pheripheral Pheripheral
Posted:	2019-03-28 06:53

Zenoss 4 vs Zenoss 6 - Differences in architecture / Zenpack compatability etc.. ...