Zenoss, service level management and Hadoop

Alan Conley, CTO of Zenoss, dropped by the other day to bring me up to date on the company. Zenoss, like a number of competitors gathers a large amount of operational data from workloads, application frameworks, virtualization tools, databases, storage systems, networking equipment and systems. Then the company uses "preditive analytics" to gain a deep understanding of performance, user experience and to detect potential and actual issues.

While the company has developed tools allowing a unified view of all of the operational data that is collected, its customers demanded the ability to manage larger amounts of data quickly and easily. So, Conley said, the company's newest version of its software will use Apache Hadoop. This, he pointed out, will also allow customers to develop their own uses of this operational database using both tools supplied by Zenoss and other Hadoop-oriented tools. The move to Hadoop should allow the next generation of Zenoss' products to manage five times the operational data.

Zenoss customers that I've spoken with almost always comment on the usefulness and timeliness of the information they get from Zenoss' products. I expect the broad expansion in scope and product performance will be of great interest for them. I hope to speak with one of them in the future.