"This is one of the most significant launches in our history," said Zenoss technical evangelist Floyd Strimling of the release of Zenoss Core 4, the open-source core version of the company's namesake product. "We worked to revamp many of the architectural components."

Zenoss monitors network services such as Web servers and mail services as well as the health and utilization of network devices, such as routers. The company claims that the software can process up to 100 million events per day.

, the Zenoss developers have upgraded the software's event system so it now uses the message bus based on the industry standard AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) to transmit event notifications.

AMQP speeds communication time among different internal Zenoss components, but a potentially bigger advantage is that provides an easier way for Zenoss both to send and receive data with other applications also using AMQP.

Such interoperability can be crucial in the emerging concept of the programmable data center. The programmable data center is shorthand for set a of technologies -- such as virtualization, software defined networking () -- that allow administrators to more tightly control hardware and software, so workloads can be moved around easier.