Last week, we announced that we are sunsetting Zenoss Community Edition, which was previously called Zenoss Core. (The title of this blog post refers to it as Zenoss Core, as that was the name for most of those 15 years and is the name by which most people know it.) Zenoss Community Edition was a free, on-prem monitoring tool the company made available for over 15 years, which had been downloaded millions of times.
Zenoss Community Edition version 1.0 was released Nov. 15, 2006. From then until now, the product became the de facto open-source monitoring tool for companies of all sizes across all industries. Some of the highlights of that journey for Zenoss Community Edition include:
- Being named SIIA CODiE Award finalist for Best Open Source Innovation in 2014.
- Launching companion open-source project Control Center, powered by Docker, in 2014.
- Being recognized by InfoWorld with the Best Open Source Software Award in 2008.
- Joining Sun, Google and Canonical as a global sponsor of Software Freedom Day 2008, a worldwide celebration of free software.
- Being among open-source leaders selected for the Red Hat Exchange launch in 2007.
- Participating as a founding member of the Open Source Channel Alliance.
- Building a user community that enabled collaboration and crowdsourced development of extensions.
- Producing over 500 community-developed ZenPacks.
- Sponsoring and delivering product demonstrations at hundreds of conferences and events.
But over the past decade, we have witnessed a rapid evolution in IT operations, and specifically in IT monitoring. Customer needs have changed — not only with what they need to monitor, but how they want to consume monitoring technology. One key aspect of this was the trend toward consuming monitoring technology in a SaaS model. Customers expressed great interest in no longer needing to procure and build their own systems to host monitoring tools, and preferred having a turnkey cloud-based option.
Another trend we observed was, due to the complexity of modern IT environments, customers were looking for service-centric monitoring. Our good friends (and competitors) at SolarWinds taught us many years ago that there was a successful business model in selling lightweight tools directly to practitioners. But what that created in many environments was the ever-so-common problem of having a glut of siloed tools. Over time, customers learned there was no way to effectively monitor large, complex environments with dozens of disconnected tools, and the market began trending toward unified monitoring.
To address both of these trends, in April 2013, we launched Zenoss-as-a-Service (ZaaS), a unified monitoring platform delivered as a service. ZaaS was simply a hosted version of the on-prem product, which Zenoss deployed and maintained on behalf of customers. For customers, it was a SaaS option, but for Zenoss, it was still individual deployments, so the economies of scale you get from true SaaS products was limited. In several years of offering both on-prem and SaaS options, customers resoundingly opted for a SaaS monitoring platform.
In June 2018 we launched Zenoss Cloud, a true multitenant SaaS platform delivering full-stack monitoring and AIOps. Since the launch of Zenoss Cloud, which saw a 202% increase in annual recurring revenue over the past two years, the contribution from our vast user base has gradually transitioned from crowdsourced development of extensions for Zenoss Community Edition to community development of cloud tools.
With the increasingly rapid demand for cloud-based monitoring tools, Zenoss recently announced the Zenoss Developer Center, where users can build tools for Zenoss Cloud — integrations, extensions and applications that bring any data into the platform and deliver data-based insights for unprecedented context that streamlines troubleshooting, analysis and planning. As such, the company is transitioning its crowdsourcing focus from its existing community to the Zenoss Developer Center. The community platform will be decommissioned March 31.
Zenoss Community Edition has been a resounding success in so many ways, and it has played an important role in our journey as a company. But you can never rest on your laurels — you always need to adapt with customer needs. We’re making this important pivot to direct all of that momentum toward the future, which is Zenoss Cloud.
Request a demo to see how Zenoss Cloud deploys immediately, eliminates noise, and ensures service reliability in the most complex, modern IT environments.
