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Entities and devices

In Zenoss environments, entity and device have specific meanings.

Entities

In Zenoss Cloud, an entity represents any discrete system, process or feature for which Zenoss Cloud gathers or is sent time series data. Traditional monitoring targets such as hosts, switches, applications, containers, microservices, and the like are represented as entities. Non-traditional targets and even abstract concepts can be entities, too:

  • A web transaction to a specific URL made by a specific user with a specific browser type from a specific location.
  • Conference registrations or survey results.
  • The daily special in the cafeteria.

Broadly defined, an entity can be any set of metadata that you want to associate with time-ordered data.

Devices

In Collection Zones, a device is a physical or virtual system, or local or cloud infrastructure, from which a Collection Zone gathers availability, performance, and model data.

  • Example systems include servers, routers, storage systems, and switches.
  • Example infrastructures include Amazon Web Services, VMware vCloud, and Microsoft Azure.

A device component is a resource that belongs to a specific device or a process that runs on a specific device.

Tip

All devices and device components are entities.