Extended Monitoring Guide
Distributed Collector allows you to deploy additional performance collection and event monitoring daemons to the Zenoss server or other servers. This allows you to:
Distribute processor, disk, and network load across multiple servers.
Collect performance and events from networks that cannot be reached by the Zenoss server.
Configure more than one set of monitoring settings, such as different cycle times for the
zenperfsnmpdaemon.
When you first install Distributed Collector, Zenoss is configured with one hub and one collector. A collector is a set of collection daemons, on the Zenoss server or another server, that shares a common configuration. That configuration contains values such as number of seconds between SNMP collection cycles, default discovery networks, and maximum number of zenprocess parallel jobs.
Each collector has its own copy of each of the Zenoss collection daemons. For example, Zenoss initially contains collection daemons with names like zenperfsnmp, zenprocess, and zenping. If you create a new collector named My2ndCollector, then the system creates new daemons named My2ndCollector_zenperfsnmp, My2ndCollector_zenprocess, and My2ndCollector_zenping.
You cannot delete the initial hub and collector set up by Distributed Collector (both named localhost).
Servers hosting remote hubs or collectors must be the same operating system and hardware architecture as the Zenoss server. For example, if the Zenoss server is running RedHat Enterprise Linux v5 on Intel 32-bit hardware, then hubs and collectors can be deployed only to other RHEL 5 32-bit servers.
You must update all hubs and collectors after performing any of these functions on your master Zenoss server:
Upgrade
Install patches
Install, upgrade, or remove ZenPacks
To update, navigate to the Reconfigure Collector option on the Overview collector page.
For additional platform-specific information, refer to Section 5.5, “Platform Notes”.
When you log in as the Zenoss admin user, the Navigation pane displays a link titled Collectors in the Management area. Click this link to go to the Collectors page, which lists existing hubs and collectors in hierarchical form. Hubs are listed at the top level; collectors are nested below the hub to which they belong.
From this page, you can:
Add a hub
Delete a hub (which also deletes its associated collectors)
View and edit hub settings
The Daemons tab lists the copy of the zenhub daemon that belongs to the collector. Links adjacent to the daemon name allow you to view its log, and view and edit its configuration. Use the buttons to the right of the daemon name to stop, start, and restart the daemon.