Zenoss is very pleased to announce the general availability of Resource Manager 6.4, Service Impact 5.5.1 and Control Center 1.6.5 along with upgrades to related ZenPacks. These updates are included in the latest release of Zenoss Cloud and Zenoss as a Service, as well as in Zenoss Service Dynamics 6.4.
The focus areas for this release include:
- Enhancements to Service Impact performance
- Enhancements to the modeling pipeline
- Continued improvements to the ZenHub service, building on work first released in RM 6.3
- More self-monitoring functions
- ZenPack changes focusing on improved Service Impact performance and reliability
On-premises customers of Zenoss Service Dynamics should work with their Zenoss support team to plan for the upgrade. ZaaS customers will receive the release automatically. Zenoss Cloud customers have received many of the improvements through incremental monthly updates with the remainder to be completed during the next Collection Zone upgrade.
Model Pipeline Updates
The model pipeline processes inter- and intra-device relationships and assures that Zenoss software presents an accurate representation of the overall IT infrastructure.
Resource Manager 6.4 delivers four key model pipeline enhancements:
- We’ve changed the internal ApplyDataMap function to handle large model updates without blocking other functions.
- We’ve upgraded the MariaDB version for its greatly improved performance on the specific queries we use to update relationships.
- We’ve profiled the model pipeline as it ran in several large customer environments, making numerous changes to generally improve efficiency.
- We’ve added selective caching to the Solr catalog to improve model graph building.
The diagram above illustrates the model pipeline and areas changed. The ZSD 6.3 release in January separated zenhubworkers as separate services from the zenhub service. Impact 5.4 focused only on the Service Impact feature. ZSD 6.4 touches all the yellow areas and includes additional Service Impact feature changes.
Service Impact Updates
Service Impact performs three key functions:
- Provides customers continuous awareness of the state of which IT components support a set of monitored objects — collectively referred to as a “service.”
- Increases IT team efficiency by decreasing event noise. IT teams can focus on whether a service is affected with automatically correlated events.
- Reduces maintenance errors by identifying which services any particular component supports. Need to replace a blade server? You’ll be able to check whether you’ve actually moved all the critical services off of it first.
Service Impact 5.5.1 improves overall performance, simplifies relationship building, and reduces the time needed to change production state.
Continued ZenHub Updates
ZenHub is the internal component that governs data flowing to and from the collectors.
In Resource Manager 6.3, we implemented horizontal scaling, improving overall ZenHub performance by increasing the number of containers that can handle ZenHub processing tasks. This enhancement leveraged Control Center to provide horizontal scaling.
With Resource Manager 6.4, we moved “invalidation worker” subtasks into separate containers. Invalidation is the processing that applies changes into the model. Executing this function in separate containers allows better conflict avoidance and can support larger environments by increasing the number of containers handling invalidations.
Additional Self-Monitoring Functions
Zenoss manages operations for a substantial portion of our customer base. Our site reliability engineering (SRE) team is focused on creating systems to accomplish the work that would otherwise be manually performed by system administrators.
The SRE team uses automation to monitor the ongoing success of the customer environments we manage. As part of building out the automation, the team extended the self-monitoring capabilities of the Resource Manager and Control Center ZenPacks. We’re making those capabilities available to our on-premises customers so they can also automate processes and achieve higher levels of success.
Notable changes include new monitoring for ApplyDataMap, Resource Manager and Impact model sizes, ElasticSearch, and OpenTSDB statistics.
ZenPack Changes
Multiple ZenPacks have been changed to enhance the accuracy of service models in environments where relationship changes are common.
What's Next?
As always, more information is available in the release notes at https://zsd-help.zenoss.com.
We recommend that all on-premises customers upgrade to ZSD 6.4.
- Customers upgrading from version 5.x can significantly reduce upgrade time by following steps in this Knowledge Base article.
ZaaS and Zenoss Cloud customers will receive the updates automatically.
Isn’t that nice?
Future Release Plans
We expect to deliver one additional release during 2019, with a tentative target in the September/October time frame. Our product plans may change based on business conditions, of course.
