An Overview of Resource Manager 4.x Daemons

Applies To

• Zenoss 4.x

Summary

Resource Manager ships with a default set of daemons that perform various functions. Additional daemons may be added when additional Zenpacks are installed. This document examines the daemons that are present on an 'out of the box' Resource Manager installation.

Resource Manager Application / Database Management Daemons

The following list provides an overview of the Resource Manager daemons that complete tasks related to providing the user interface, managing the event and device databases, and providing other Resource Manager application related tasks:

zenactiond -
Daemon that executes Zenoss notifications which include actions such as sending out emails or executing commands based on incoming Zenoss events meeting one or more “trigger” criteria established by Zenoss administrators.

zencatalogservice -
Daemon that creates and maintains a Lucene index of the Zope object database (ZODB) to improve overall application performance.

zendisc -
Daemon employed on versions of Zenoss prior to 4.2.2 that discovers new network resources by walking through the routing table to discover the network topology and then pinging all discovered networks to find active IP addresses and devices.

zeneventd -
Daemon that performs event processing such as correlating device self-identifications with database object names, fetching device characteristic information & populating event fields appropriately, and executing event transforms.

zeneventserver -
Daemon that performs final event processing, indexing and storage. Processing performed by zeneventserver includes deduplication & clearing, trigger analysis & trigger signal queuing, fanout queuing (if Impact is installed), indexing and storage of the events into Zends.

zenhub -
Daemon that brokers communication between collector daemons and all Zenoss processes.

zenhubworker -
Daemon that provides an intermediate connection between collectors and the modeling and event databases. Can be run on the master server, on remote servers, or both.

zenjmx-
A ZenPack that enables monitoring of Java applications by communicating with remote Java Management Extensions (JMX) agents.

zenjobs -
Daemon that manages scheduling and execution of Zenoss application level tasks such as adding or moving devices or adding collectors. Beginning in 4.2.2, zenjobs is based on Celery and uses rabbitmq for job queuing.

zenjserver -
Daemon that renders the Java-based ‘Dynamic Views’ found in the Zenoss user interface.

zenpython -
Runs Python monitoring code supplied by other ZenPacks (ZenPacks.zenoss.PythonCollector).

zenrrdcached -
Daemon that caches RRD writes by collector daemons to improve performance.

zentune -
Daemon that periodically performs an analysis of the current Zenoss application configuration and generates recommendations for Zenoss administrators to improve Zenoss performance as appropriate.

zenwebserver -
A command line utility providing administrators with an interface to control the Zenoss Zope instance(s) and the NGINX load balancer managing traffic to and from the Zope instance(s).

zredis -
Provides a shared repository for all zenping daemons, and facilitates correlation of "ping down" events.

Resource Manager Modeling Daemons

Certain daemons in Resource Manager are exclusively tasked with gathering characteristic information about monitored resources in a data center. This gathering of characteristic information is known of as 'modeling.' The following are the modeling daemons in Resource Manager:

zenmodeler -
Daemon that periodically gathers and updates characteristic information about monitored devices (except VMware; see zenvmwaremodeler).

zenvmwaremodeler -
Daemon that periodically gathers and updates characteristic information about monitored VMware vCenter hosts and endpoints.

Resource Manager Monitoring Daemons

Certain daemons in Resource Manager are exclusively tasked with gathering performance information about monitored resources in a data center. This gathering of performance information is known of as 'monitoring.' Following are the monitoring daemons in Resource Manager:

zencommand -
Daemon that collects performance data from monitored devices by running commands and parsing their output.

zeneventlog -
Daemon that collects Windows Event Viewer events.

zenmailtx -
Daemon that performs mail transactions to test the performance of monitored email servers.

zenperfsnmp -
Performs high-performance, asynchronous SNMP performance collection and stores it locally to the collector. Thresholds are tested each time a value is written to disk.

zenping -
Daemon that monitors device availability by pinging. Beginning in (4.1.1), uses NMAP to build a Ping Tree to perform Layer 3 event suppression.

zenprocess -
Daemon that performs up/down monitoring of monitored servers’ processes.

zenstatus -
Daemon that performs active connection testing of IP services on monitored servers.

zensyslog -
Daemon that listens for incoming syslog events from monitored servers to create corresponding Zenoss events.

zentrap -
Daemon that listens for SNMP traps from monitored servers to create corresponding Zenoss events

zenucsevents -
Daemon that collects Cisco UCS event log events from monitored UCS instances.

zenvcloud -
Daemon that collects performance data from vCloud cells.

zenvmwareevents -
Daemon that collects VMware event logs from monitored instances of VMware.

zenvmwareperf -
Daemon that collects performance data from VMware devices.

zenvsphere -
Daemon that collects performance data through a VMware vCenter server.

zenwebtx -
Daemon that conducts web-based synthetic transactions to test the performance of monitored websites.

zenwin -
Daemon that performs up/down monitoring of Windows services.

zenwinperf -
Daemon that collects performance data from Windows servers using a combination of the WMI and Perfmon protocols.