Modeling devices

Let's get our devices in shape to be modeled.

When we talk about Zenoss Core, two related terms often come up, monitoring and modeling. Monitoring refers to the availability of the device and answers the question, "Is the device accessible?". Modeling defines relationships between devices and identifies the components available on a device, such as services, interfaces, and file systems. It then collects varying amounts of data about each component.

Zenoss models devices via WMI, SNMP, SSH/Telnet, and port scan. Each class has a default set of collector plugins that tells Zenoss how to model the devices assigned to the class.

Remember in Chapter 2, Discovering Devices when we set up our servers to be monitored by setting up WMI, SNMP, and the Zenoss plugins? Now is the time to put that work to use. Feel free to go back and review that section now.

As we model our servers, routers, and other network devices, we'll be interested in setting the collector plugins and zProperties...