If our toaster could plug into our network, Zenoss Core could receive events from it. In this chapter, we used Zenoss Core as a centralized place to manage events from many different sources, including syslog, Windows Event Log, shell scripts using zensendevent, and e-mail using zenmail and zenpop3.

Regardless of whether Zenoss Core generated the event or the event was generated by external applications, we can transform the event by modifying its attributes. This is powerful stuff and it means you can bend your monitoring environment to your will.

Alerts give events a way to get noticed, and we wrapped up our discussion on events by setting up alert notifications. That way, those pesky events, aka problems, can get fixed.

In the next chapter, we look at ways to extend our monitoring capabilities with add-on modules called zenpacks.