2023 updates

The visible and not-so-visible parts of Zenoss Cloud are updated regularly. This page highlights the visible new features or enhancements released in 2023.

December 14

This month's updates include the following enhancements in Inventory, Data Access, and Events.

Inventory

Inventory now includes the following enhancements:

• Group by: In the column menu, select Group by . This option is useful if you want to focus on a specific group of entities, such as a set of entities in a specific device class or a location of entities. For more information, see Adjust column views.

• Numeric operators for numeric types: When creating a query in Advanced Search, you can select numeric operators when the property name is a numeric type. Numeric operators include greater than, less than, equal to, and less than or equal to. For more information, see Search your inventory.

• The query bar now supports keyboard accessibility. For example, press the keyboard arrow keys to move through menus, press Enter or Tab to select options, and press Backspace or Delete to remove options. For more information, see Create a query.

• Direct access to Smart View. In the ENTITY DETAILS dialog box, you can navigate to Smart View pages. For more information, see Viewing results.

Data Access Views

Data Access now provides historical views of entity and event data not available in the zenoss_view dataset. The views in the zenoss_history_view dataset include cz_components, cz_devices, cz_events, cz_entities, entities, and metadata. You can find these views in the new zenoss_history_view_daily, zenoss_history_view_weekly, and zenoss_history_view_monthly datasets, which differ only by the addition of specific time constraints.

In addition, the Data Access documentation now includes more information about getting started with Data Access. For more information, see Data Access.

Events

Previously, the events console was sorted by default only in descending order by the lastUpdated column. To ensure that sort includes critical events on the first page as much as possible, the event console is sorted by default first in descending order by Severity, then in descending order by lastUpdated.

November 14

You can now use the Entity fields page in Dictionary service to provide more readable and compact alternatives to computer-generated entity field names. User-friendly entity field names are useful in Inventory when building custom queries.

Entity field entries provide additional context for fields found on Zenoss entities, including commonly used fields like source and source-type. You can also provide additional context on custom fields that you might send into Zenoss.

In addition to updates on the Dictionary service page, you can also use the Zenoss API to create, read, update, and delete entity field entries.

October 31

You can now manage closing events with the event aging policy. This global policy defines the conditions under which Zenoss Cloud changes the status of inactive events to Closed. The eventAging_default policy is automatically enabled.

For an event that has a severity level that is equal to Warning, Zenoss Cloud closes the inactive event after one day. For an event that has a severity level that is less than Warning, Zenoss Cloud closes the inactive event after 2 hours. To learn more, see Policy service.

October 12

You can now use the Zenoss Site Availability Monitor (SAM) to proactively prevent and limit adverse situations by checking the uptime of your services and notifying business and application owners and administrators of problems before they impact your organization. Zenoss Site Availability Monitor (SAM) allows you to monitor web applications using the HTTP or HTTPS protocols. For more information about SAM and the SAM tile in Dashboards, see Site Availability Monitor (SAM).

To get started with SAM, connect your site and create your dashboard. For more information about the SAM connector and Site Availability dashboard template, see Set up a SAM connector. You can also add multiple sites in a single configuration file while specifying specific criteria for individual sites. For details, see Set site availability monitoring for a specific site.

This update also includes additional Inventory templates. You can now access templates for vSphere, Azure, and Zoom.

October 5

This update simplifies the field names on the Policy page in the ADMIN tab. These fields are used in dialog boxes and information panels in the Policy feature, including the EDIT POLICY dialog box and both tabs in the policy details and datasource details information panes.

Here are the field name changes for the POLICIES and DATASOURCES tabs:

Old field name	New field name
Policy details	Details
Policy name	Name
Policy scope	Scope
Policy type	Type
Datasource name	Name
Datasource scope	Scope

Additionally, the data type now appears with the datasource name in the Datasources column of the policies table. As a part of this improvement, the Datatypes column no longer appears in the table.

August 24

When investigating an anchor entity in Smart View, you can now view related events distributed across a selected time range.

Select the new Event View to view events in either the collapsed or extended event card at the top of the page and to view those related events in a table below. Click an event in the table to view it in the Events console for further discovery. For more information, see Event View.

Also, the improved events timeline provides more detail about the severity of events using a density column chart. For more information, see Events card.

August 17

Zoom connectors are now generally available. You can set up your Zoom connector in ADMIN so you can view Zoom metrics in your dashboards, such as meeting duration, user attendance, and performance health. View the supported metrics at Zoom metrics. If you already have a Zoom connector set up, you don't have to reconfigure it to enjoy the benefits of this release.

August 1

In the Events List + Count tile on your dashboard, you can now navigate to the Events console to view the associated event in more detail. See Event List + Count tile for more information.

June 22

The export control on events console now includes a new format option, Excel, for Microsoft Excel (XLSX) downloads.

June 13

You can now save any events console as a separate view, for yourself or for sharing with others. The toolbar includes a new SAVE AS button, and the list of views, including templates, is available at the immediate left of the Events title (on the far left side).

Zoom connector credentials are updated to use OAuth authentication instead of JWT.

Previously, graph tiles did not display accurate information in the tooltip on mouseover, which is corrected in this update.

This update includes improved error handling when required permissions are not available in M365 connectors.

June 6

User preferences now include an option to display tables more compactly, which increases the number of entries the table can display per page.

The list of required permissions for Microsoft 365 connectors is updated to include the ServiceHealth.Read.All permission.

May 18

Zenoss Data Monitor is now generally available! The lightweight Linux and Windows agents enable modeling and monitoring without a Collection Zone and provide access to all of the great Zenoss Cloud tools like dashboards, Smart View, and the action service. If you already have a Zenoss Data Monitor agent installed, you don't have to re-install it to enjoy the benefits of this release.

May 4

The Data Access option now provides views of event occurrences and event metadata, and the metadata includes event field labels from the dictionary service.

April 27

You can now specify a rate or delta value when you create a threshold for a metric trigger.

April 25

With this update, filtering events in an events console with an event class is faster.

The connectors table (at ADMIN > Connectors) now includes a column displaying the dashboard associated with a connector, if any.

April 20

This update includes a pair of documentation updates.

• For optimal performance, Zenoss recommends limiting dashboards to 4-6 tiles per page and 2 pages per dashboard. Likewise, Graph tiles perform better when each tile is limited to 2-3 metrics.

• Descriptions of JSON and YAML fields are now underlined with a dotted line. When you move your mouse over a field, a popup displays the field's logical path in a file.

April 13

This update includes numerous dashboard memory optimizations, Now, you can open multiple dashboard pages in separate tabs without running out of memory.

April 11

In events consoles, you can now pin columns to the right or left side of the table.

April 6

Events consoles now include fields from the Incident Management Integration Service in details panels, if Collection Zones in your environment include the ZenPack.

March 28

The Graph tile now better supports metrics from streaming sources with data point values that always increase. Previously, the values could only be shown as increasing; now, you can choose to align the data points by rate or delta.

March 23

The new credentials service is now generally available! The credentials service provides secure, centralized storage for the credentials that are required to integrate with external services. You enter credentials once and then reuse them as often as you wish when you configure connectors or destinations.

The rollout of this new service includes an automatic migration. All existing connectors and destinations that use credentials are updated to use the credentials service. The names of migrated credentials start with Autogenerated and are tagged autogenerated. You can easily identify them and change the names (and remove tags) at any time.

Finally, you can now export both dashboards and individual tiles to PDF files.

March 9

The new Kubernetes connector is now generally available! The connector supports clusters on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as self-hosted clusters.

March 2

Map tiles now includes zoom controls, which make it easier for trackpad users to view Locations on larger maps.

The column controls on events console now include options for automatically sizing a column.

February 28

Restriction filters no longer cause performance degradation on Smart View pages.

February 23

You can now configure the Stoplight tile to display a simple message and color (the default visualization) or a gauge, which includes the current metric value or aggregated value.

February 9

• A new Zenoss Cloud Collector virtual appliance is available for IBM Cloud environments.

• Each row of the events console table now includes event management tools, both on a new vertical ellipsis (⋮) menu and on event details panels.

• On the ADMIN > Actions page, the Tags field of the ADD TRIGGER dialog is now adjacent to the other general information fields.

• Dashboard templates that included the deprecated Event Count or Event List tiles are updated to use the Event List + Count tile instead.

January 31

The Event Count and Event List tiles are deprecated. The Event List + Count tile provides equivalent or superior functionality. For more information, refer to the deprecation notice.

The user setting for the Events beta infrastructure is no longer relevant and is removed in this update.

January 26

The default dictionary entries supplied by Zenoss now include tags that identify the source of an event field or metric.

January 19

Inventory view results pages now include a control that displays or hides the query bar. The new default is to hide the query bar.

January 5

The Graph tile now includes an option to interpolate all data points in bar area and area charts. This option is useful when data points are not aggregated, use the same units, and have common timestamps.