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Get started with Zenoss Cloud

Welcome to Zenoss Cloud!

Zenoss Cloud is the leading software-as-a-service, deep infrastructure monitoring platform. Zenoss Cloud builds real-time models of IT infrastructure and services and uses machine learning algorithms to quickly identify the root causes of outages.

Dashboards

Zenoss Cloud dashboards display key indicators of a collection of entities over any range of time. You define the collection of entities a dashboard includes—its scope—with a query. Indicators include metric graphs, status tables, lists, maps, notes, and more. You create dashboards to provide status information for your environment as a whole, for key components of your infrastructure, and for critical services. To get started quickly, you can copy an existing dashboard or copy one of our templates.

Anomaly detection service

The anomaly detection service employs an advanced neural network algorithm to identify data points of key metrics that are outside a metric's normal range of values. The service uses deep historical data and frequent model training to deliver accurate, precise, and near real-time results. The results are used on Smart View pages, dashboards, and in the action service.

Smart View

Smart View pages display graphs and charts of an entity's metrics and events during the time range you select, whether minutes or months past. Unlike dashboards, which you create, Zenoss Cloud provides Smart View pages for every entity in your environment. Smart View pages include information about all the entities on which the anchor entity depends, either in a ranked list of tiles or in an interactive dependency graph. Throughout, AI assistants put the most important graphs and any anomalous metric data front and center. This unique combination of truly relevant information make Smart View pages the premier tool for investigating infrastructure and service issues.

Use Smart View pages to:

  • Find unusual patterns and changes in resource consumption with machine learning from event and performance streams
  • Explore historical data in context with living, dynamic dependency modeling
  • Predict service impacts from any failing component and related resources
  • Explore a dependency graph of related entities

Action service

The action service provides tools for responding automatically to changes in your environment. You configure it to examine incoming events or metric data points and send notifications (one-way messages) when conditions match the criteria you specify.

Inventory view

The inventory view displays entities that are currently in your Zenoss Cloud environment and their properties. Entities are displayed in a table with one row per entity and one column for each property. Each row provides links to additional information.

Entity properties vary widely by source, so the default display of a table of entities from many sources includes many columns. To help you display tables with fewer, fuller columns, the inventory view includes a query interface and options for saving and sharing queries. Inventory queries consist of one or more entity property-value comparisons.

Events console

An events console displays an interactive table of all events in the current time range and tools for managing events. You can see related metric graphs and compare related events side-by-side.

Dictionary service

The dictionary service provides more readable or compact alternatives to computer-generated metric and event field names, as well as other supplemental information. Dictionary entries enhance the usability of Zenoss Cloud wherever metric and event information is displayed.

Collection Zones

A Collection Zone represents a set of collectors, which are groups of services that gather availability, performance, or model data from infrastructure resources and services. Collectors can be used for logical or geographical separation of resources and services within an organization, and with this flexibility, one Collection Zone is typically all that is needed.

Streaming data

Zenoss Cloud provides a variety of methods for gathering model, metric, and event data without a Collection Zone. Each method uses the data receiver resources of the Zenoss API to update Zenoss Cloud. Updates are either a single transaction or a regular flow of data (hence the name streaming data).

Data collection methods include:

  • ZenPacks. Learn more.

  • Connectors. A connector gathers data from public cloud applications with just a little configuration.

  • Agents. An independent agent sends data either directly to Zenoss Cloud or indirectly through a proxy. Agents are distributed as Docker images or platform-native packages.

  • Integrations. You can create customized applications with data receiver resources or with existing Zenoss libraries.

All your streaming data flows can be customized with the policy service, which allows you to define, manage, and enforce policies that control access to your resources. For more information, see Policy service.

Credentials service

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.

Customization options

Zenoss Cloud offers the following customization and integration options.

  • The Zenoss API provides direct access to the services that power Zenoss Cloud and is the preferred integration interface.

  • The optional Data Access feature allows you to use your favorite SQL tools to display and analyze the monitoring data that Zenoss Cloud receives from your infrastructure and applications.

  • You can add new functionality to Collection Zones with customized ZenPacks. This can be as simple as adding new device classes or monitoring templates, or as complex as extending the data model and creating new collection services.