Zenoss Enterprise Features

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 of resources using 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

• Device organization by logical system (such as Finance, HR, Support, etc.)
• 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

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

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

Alerting

Zenoss provides an array of rich alerting options that include:

• Alert delivery via e-mail, SMS, SNMP traps, and other custom interfaces
• Alert delay rules (standard, custom, and personalized rules apply)
• Basic and Advanced escalation rules
• Level 3 Topology awareness to correlate alarms across connected systems and suppress causal (avoiding "alert storms")

Automatic Remediation

When configured by operations, Zenoss can take corrective actions, based on rules and policies, when problems occur in the infrastructure. The Zenoss remediation system includes:

• Native capability to build policy-based rules that trigger automatic action and response. Common triggers for action include availability failure, crossing of performance thresholds, and matching predefined log values
• Execution of policy-based actions when conditions such as availability error or performance slowdown are detected
• Support for standard actions (i.e., start service, stop service, etc.), as well as custom remediation scripts

Enterprise Reports Library

The Enterprise Reports Library is available to Zenoss Enterprise subscribers and provides the following reports:

• Systems Availability - Shows you systems availability in time & percentage
• Organizer Availability - Shows availability percentage of all network organizers in the system
• Event Time to Resolution - Shows the total time taken to either acknowledge or clear events on a per-user basis
• Interface Volume - Shows total number of bytes transferred. Often used for billing for customers who charge based on bandwidth
• 95th Percentile - Network interface utilization report that also reports on-average utilization as well as the 95th percentile utilization. The 95th percentile method more closely reflects the needed capacity of the network link
• Alert Rules Inventory - Shows all alert rules and the e-mail addresses to which alerts are sent
• Maintenance Windows - Shows all maintenance windows
• Defined Thresholds - Reports on all thresholds defined in the system
• User Event Activity - Shows the total number of events acknowledged and cleared on a per-user basis
• Group Membership by User - Shows all users and the groups to which they belong

NetFlow Reporting

NetFlow reporting is available as part of the Plixer Zenoss partnership

• Using Plixer's Scrutinizer ZenPack enables Zenoss users to quickly access a variety of NetFlow reports
• NetFlow reports include "Top Talkers" and "Top Conversations"

Device Reports

Device Reports present users with an aggregate view of data over multiple devices (and their attributes). Some examples of Device Reports are:

• All Monitored Components - Includes all of the components currently being monitored by Zenoss
• Device Changes - Includes a listing of devices with their configuration changes
• Ping Status Issues - Provides information on failed ping attempts for the monitored devices
• SNMP Status Issues - Provides information on failed SNMP attempts for the monitored devices
• New Devices - Lists devices that have been recently added
• All Devices - Lists all of the devices added to the Zenoss system

Event Reports

Event reporting delivers aggregate data about events, event mappings and event classes. Some examples of Event Reports are:

• All Heartbeats - Shows all heartbeats for monitored devices
• All Event Classes - Provides data on all of the event classes that reside in the Zenoss system
• All Event Mappings - Shows all user-created event mappings

Performance Reports

Performance Reporting allows users to aggregate performance data across the entire Zenoss system. Some examples of Performance Reports are:

• Availability - Lists the availability of each device as a percentage
• CPU Utilization - Lists the Load Average for each device
• Threshold Summary- Lists the devices that approach or exceed their thresholds
• Interface Utilization - Displays a full list of interface statistics for each device
• Memory Utilization - Lists the memory usage for each device being monitored
• File System Utilization - Shows the Total Bytes, used Bytes, Free Bytes and Percent Utilization for each device
• Notification Schedules - Shows all of the alerting rules and the details associated with each rule

100% Browser-based User Interface

• Easy to deploy to stakeholders across the organization
• No Linux expertise required to administer the application
• Easy to support and rollout changes

Personalized Dashboards

• Portlet based dashboard, that updates in real time
• Drag and drop customization
• Customizable views by end user

Access Control

• Authentication required for access
• Role-based permissions and views
• Management of permissions through web-based administration
• Integration with 3rd party directories

Global Dashboard

The Global Dashboard is intended for large enterprises who have multiple installations of Zenoss Enterprise. Using the Global Dashboard customers can quickly see the performance & availability of their entire IT Infrastructure across multiple Zenoss Enterprise Installations.

• Role-based access control allows each stakeholder to see the most appropriate data and presentation of that data (i.e. graphs, metric lists, alerts, etc.)
• Allows operators to easily compare and contrast the performance & availability across multiple Zenoss Enterprise Installations
• Single aggregated data view of all devices that are being monitored

Geographical Visualization

• Displays geographic location of devices on Google Maps from within Zenoss
• Color coded status indication for nodes and connections between different locations
• Customized severity settings for color coded status indicators

Topological Visualization

• Flash-based map of layer 3 network topology
• Icon based device representation of Linux and Windows devices
• Search capability to locate specific devices

Distributed Collectors

Zenoss Enterprise 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

High Availability

Zenoss Enterprise 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

Global Dashboard

The Global Dashboard is intended for large enterprises who have multiple installations of Zenoss Enterprise. Using the Global Dashboard customers can quickly see the performance & availability of their entire IT Infrastructure across multiple Zenoss Enterprise Installations.

• Role-based access control allows each stakeholder to see the most appropriate data and presentation of that data (i.e. graphs, metric lists, alerts, etc.)
• Allows operators to easily compare and contrast the performance & availability across multiple Zenoss Enterprise Installations
• Single aggregated data view of all devices that are being monitored

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

Integration APIs

Zenoss Enterprise is open for easy customization and integration with other applications. Zenoss supports integration using the following approaches:

• Web Services APIs (XML-RPC and REST)
• XML Import/Export
• Python Scripting Shell

Remedy Integration

Connects Zenoss Enterprise to the Remedy Help Desk system. With this integration, Zenoss users receive:

• Automatic creation of Remedy Help Desk tickets directly from Zenoss Events
• Direct access (from the help desk system) into Zenoss Enterprise for troubleshooting
• Remediation of performance issues before they cause costly down time of systems

RANCID Integration

Enables integration between RANCID Network Management tool and Zenoss Enterprise

• Single point of control for configuration tasks through centralized administration
• Complete router inventory database with Zenoss auto discovery
• Real time router configuration change detection

LDAP Integration

Leverages existing LDAP authentication infrastructure for Zenoss authorization and access control

• Supports Microsoft Active Directory, OpenLDAP, and any LDAPv3 compliant directory
• Provides Single Sign-on for Zenoss by using existing Directory infrastructure
• Automatic enforcement of corporate security policies and compliance controls