Enterprise Tip: Zivios Enterprise Management System Open Source

Zivios is a web based control panel which brings together vital open source technologies needed by medium and large enterprises. At it’s core, Zivios provides identity management, single sign-on, user, group and computer provisioning, as well as remote management of services.

What is Zivios?

Zivios aims to be a consolidated management portal for providing core infrastructure services using opensource technologies. The long term goals of Zivios are:

• Identity Management
• Single Sign-on and Certificate authority
• Package and Patch Management
• Service Management
• Network Monitoring
• Backup provisioning
• Core Infrastructure Services (NTP,DNS, etc)

With an infinitely extensible plugin architecture, Zivios extends all aforementioned fundamentals to an arbitrary number of services. The ideology behind Zivios is that datastore for services can be (and most likely, will be) different. As such, we cannot depend on Ldap or Kerberos to fulfill our identity Management needs. Zivios allows the use of plugins which maintain their own independent datastore following CRUD operations.

With an extensibile framework, Zivios addresses the needs of complex heterogeneous deployments by providing an open and scalable API for modular development and sanitized consolidation.

Why Zivios?

Opensource software has progressed to the point where it can (feature-wise) compete with many proprietary offerings. However, use of such technologies stay limited to large corporations who have experienced and highly skilled IT staff. Zivios consolidates and simplifies the use and management of complex technologies and builds on them to provide an integrated identity management platform. With an infinitely extensible plugin system, any application can be managed via Zivios.

We feel that managing a fully featured opensource network is currently out of reach of the average administrator. Integration and proper management of servers, services and identity requires intricate knowledge and, unfortunately, has a rather steep learning curve.

Highlighting Key Points of Zivios

• Zivios allows the administrator to get up to speed with the opensource technologies quickly and without requiring indepth knowledge. The core technologies come pre-integrated so little time is wasted in the redundant task of setting it up correctly for each and every system. Core services are online right after installation. Management is done completely via the web panel, even if some tasks require access to remote machines (Zivios acts on your behalf) using server side agents.
• Zivios ensures correctness in day to day repetitive tasks such as identity management. In loosely coupled systems, Zivios also ensures compliance (imagine forgetting to delete an ex-employee's ERP account, where your ERP system is online and not integrated directly with deployed directory services.
• Zivios reduces time to task completion with cascading data changes. Imagine having to reset the password for all users in your finance department. It would be quite laborious, especially if users in the department have a diverse password store.
• Zivios allows delegated administration to be implemented in a simple manner. Since everything is part of the tree, you can delegate access of any tree object to any user or group. As training and service level knowledge is not required, delegated administration can actually be enforced. In opensource networks, it is common for few (or even singular) resources to have the knowledge required to administer a particular service or server. Delegated administration is impossible in this scenario as all requests will rebound automatically to that particular administrator, making him critical for that task.
• Zivios enforces customizable organizational workflow. Workflow will be used (in future versions) to allow for the transaction to be deferred until approved.
• Zivios allows administrators to focus on actual problems and spend time on improving the system rather than maintaining it on a day to day basic.

have a look at features, architecture and screenshots page for more details.

Zivios main interface is built upon a PHP framework, for communication between servers/devices they have implemented a python based modular and extensible agent(a simple XML-RPC server) with ssl support for security purpose.

Current version of zivios is 0.6.x, and is in under extensive development, you can communicate with zivios developers via irc or mailing lists.

Links

• Zivios Website
• Zivios on Launchpad