Auto-discovery of infrastructure components
Zenoss scans the entire IT infrastructure discovering all the devices on the network and their relationships. Auto-Discovery enables Operators and Administrators to have confidence and certainty about what is in their environment, to clearly understand how each component is configured, and to perceive dependencies among components.
- Streamlines the setup and configuration of monitoring
- Begins monitoring as soon as the device is discovered
- Removes the need for cumbersome manual entry of IP addresses and server names
- Continuously finds new devices as they are added to the network
Inventory and change tracking
Zenoss provides inventory management and change tracking services that allow operators to maintain a current understanding of their IT environment. Specific Inventory and Change Tracking features include:
Automatic Change History & Detection
- Automatic logging of change history during auto-discovery and manual population
- Automatic event generation and alerting based on change type and affected resource
Manual Field Population
- Manual addition of new devices
- Creation of custom fields to capture device information
- Search for devices based on custom fields
Reporting
- Global Inventory
- Change History
- Device Detail Information
External API
- Easily import IT Component information from outside resources
- Integrate with other inventory repositories via Web Services
Grouping, Organization & Classification
- Organize devices into user-defined groups representing business services
- Association of devices with geographic locations
- Ability to classify devices with varying "production level" tags such as "in maintenance" or "decommissioned"
Availability Monitoring
Zenoss provides a complete set of availability monitors that actively test key resources across the infrastructure to ensure that all devices are ready to respond to end user requests. These tests are all performed with agentless technology, which eliminates the risk associated with loading monitoring software on target systems. Specific tests and features include:
Scheduled Availability Tests
- ICMP response
- SNMP response
- Standard TCP/IP services (HTTP, SMTP, etc.)
- Specified TCP/IP ports with regular expression matching
- Windows service availability
- Windows process availability
- Linux/Unix process availability
- URL availability
- Nagios Plug-In Support
Dependency Tracking
- Intelligently suppress "downstream" tests and alerts based on layer 3 network dependencies
Event Generation
- Generate real-time events and alerts based on availability issues
Reporting
- Ping Issues
- SNMP Issues
- SLA Reporting
Performance Monitoring
Zenoss Performance monitoring helps ensure that any IT resource (or any defined group of resources) is meeting expected service levels. The Zenoss high-speed Agentless collection mechanism ensures that data is available in real-time, without adding overhead to the monitored component.
Collection Types
- Any SNMP enabled device
- Agentless JMX performance monitoring for all Java Application Servers
- Nagios and Cacti performance collection scripts
- Custom performance collection plug-ins
- Windows data collection via WMI & Perfmon
- Secure Shell (SSH) data collection for Unix and Linux Servers
Thresholds
- Ability to set multiple threshold levels on a specific metric
- Ability to generate events & alerts based on thresholds with unique severities
Graphing & Reporting
- Graphing of Trends over time: hourly, weekly, monthly & yearly
- Historical reports available for all performance data collected
Synthetic Transactions
Combining end user perspective tests (such as URL monitoring) with process, component, and interface monitoring gives IT staff information they need to quickly identify problems and potential outage locations. Synthetic Transaction monitoring provides:
- Active availability and performance monitoring of e-mail, database, and web applications
- Scheduled Control Transactions at key times of the day
- Standard reports for availability and performance trends
Predictive Threshold Trending
Predictive thresholds use statistical algorithms to help determine when an outage is occurring. Instead of using hard-coded threshold values, predicative thresholds will alert when a parameter measurement starts to suddenly change beyond its typical values.
- Smart Alerts that make intelligent decisions based on statistical data trends
- Find problems associated with sudden spikes that are not detected with statistical thresholds
- Achieve better Service Level Management using both static and dynamic thresholds
Zenoss Event Management aggregates log and event information from various sources including Zenoss availability and performance monitoring, syslogs, SNMP traps, Windows Event logs, and more.
Event Console
- View, acknowledge and close events from central console
- Search for specific events using inline event filters
- Save searches as custom views for quick access
- Quickly analyze event details using new Event Preview Pane
Event Collection
- Aggregation of events from all Zenoss monitoring sources such as: availability monitoring, performance monitoring, syslog sources, SNMP trap sources, Windows Event log, and more
- Custom event creation through XML-RPC interface
- Inclusion of application-specific text logs via custom scripts and/or third party log parsers
Event Processing & Correlation
- GUI interface for building event processing rules
- Automatic event classification
- Automatic event prioritization
- Automatic de-duplication
- Automatic begin/end correlation
- Operator acknowledgment
- Automatic and Manual Archiving
Distributed Collectors
Zenoss adds the ability to distribute collectors as needed to increase monitoring capacity. Collectors may also be distributed to reduce and localize the amount of network bandwidth used for data collection.
- Distributed collectors can be added to scale device monitoring
- Collectors can be distributed geographically to reduce network utilization
- Distributed Collectors will increase Performance Reporting capacity
- Centralized management of distributed collectors from Zenoss UI
- Distributed collectors can continue to collect data during network outages
High Availability
Zenoss offers a specific high availability configuration to ensure monitoring continues during hardware failures.
- Fail-over resiliency with active / passive configuration of two Zenoss master servers to provide a single "highly-available" master
- Collector redundancy on each master for all local network segments, ensuring full visibility at all times – both real-time and historical
Role-based Access Control Levels
Role-Based Access Control enables administrators to specify what users may do and which devices they may access.
- Easy management of access and authorization rights on a user-by-user basis
- Permissions can be set on a variety of different attributes – even an individual device
- Easily update individual user rights & permissions using Zenoss Web-based Interface
