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Events

Zenoss Cloud includes a rich variety of features and tools for managing, monitoring, analyzing, and creating events. Events are included in dashboards and Smart View pages and are the main attraction in events consoles.

Managing events

An events console displays events associated with all entities in the current time range and tools for managing events. The display includes visualizations and an interactive table.

The dictionary service provides more readable or compact alternatives to computer-generated event field names and detailed descriptions of the fields. Dictionary entries are used wherever event field names are displayed.

In addition, the Zenoss API includes event management resources for updating and annotating events.

Monitoring events

Dashboards provide tiles and options that enable near real-time event monitoring of specific entities or groups of entities.

  • The Event List + Count tile combines the displays a doughnut chart, a table of events, or both.

  • The Map tile displays the location organizers in a dashboard's scope on an interactive map. If an organizer contains entities and the entities have events during the current time range, the tile displays a doughnut chart representing the events.

  • The Top Event Producers tile displays the count of events and the names of the entities that have the greatest number of events reported against them.

To configure a dashboard for near real-time monitoring, set its time range to (for example) the last hour or 3 hours and its refresh interval to 1 minute or 3 minutes.

Analyzing events

You can analyze large or small groups of events and individual events.

  • Smart View pages can include events associated with an entity and its related entities for analyzing patterns during root cause investigations.
  • Dashboard time ranges can be set to any arbitrary value within your data retention period for investigating conditions in the past.
  • In the events console, you can select 2-4 events and compare them side-by-side, and you can display the details of a single event.

Creating events

Most events are created programmatically. External events are solicited (for example, through ZenPacks) or unsolicited (through SNMP traps or syslog). Internal events are created in response to failed pings, threshold evaluations, and other occurrences. You can use the action service to create events by specifying an event destination. The Zenoss API includes a resource for sending events to Zenoss Cloud, and the Collection Zone API does, as well. In addition, you can create test events from an events console.