Service Observability Glossary

The process of sending a one-way message (notification) to a receiving application.

A service that provides tools for responding automatically to changes in your environment.

The primary area of a Smart View page.

The anchor card displays graphs of the most important metrics of the anchor entity over a range of time.

The primary subject of a Smart View page, shown in the anchor card.

A named object for managing authentication keys for Virtana Service Observability API clients. For more information, see the Virtana Service Observability API keys topic.

A set of collectors and an interface for managing devices.

A named group of Collection Zone services that gather availability, performance, or model data about devices.

Collectors use generic protocols (ICMP, SNMP) or customized protocols (API calls) to gather data.

A grid of tiles that displays key indicators of a set of entities over a range of time.

For more information, see the Dashboards topic (Virtana Service Observability) or the Collection Zone dashboards topic.

The set of entities a dashboard includes, defined by a query. The query combines sources of data with optional filters.

A customizable visualization of one or more key performance or availability indicators.

(Collection Zone) A query that uses a specific protocol to request one or more metrics from a device or application.

For example, to gather system uptime from a Linux host, an SNMP data source requests a specific OID, and an SSH data source runs the uptime command.

The target of an action; the receiving application of a one-way message (notification).

See Also action.

(Collection Zone) 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.

See Also device component, entity.

(Collection Zone) The base set of properties that characterize a group of devices. A device may belong to only one device class.

Device class properties identify the data to collect and the protocol for collecting data.

(Collection Zone) Resources that belong to a specific device or processes that run on a specific device. For example, file systems, applications, and network interfaces.

See Also device, entity.

An entity attribute that contributes to uniquely identifying an entity.

The value of a dimension attribute cannot change.

See Also metadata attribute.

(Collection Zone) The process of identifying device components.

The results of discovery are used to populate the model.

The working dictionary entry that you want to use in Virtana Service Observability instead of the default entry provided by Virtana Service Observability. When you customize a default entry, your customized entry becomes the effective entry. When you create a new entry for a metric, entity, or event field that has no default, your new entry becomes the effective entry for your organization. For more information, see the Dictionary service topic.

An object that represents any discrete system, process, or feature for which Virtana Service Observability gathers or is sent time series data.

See Also device component.

A structured record of a notable change in the state of a resource that is sent to the event processing service. External events are solicited (for example, through ZenPacks) or unsolicited (through SNMP traps or syslog). Internal events are created in response to failed pings, threshold evaluations, and other occurrences.

(Collection Zone) A named set of properties that define a category of events, and a set of event rules.

A specific episode of the condition represented by an event.

(Cloud) A rule that you create in Event management to help manage your system's event ingest. An event policy typically consists of a query to target a specific set of events and a JavaScript expression to change the format of those events.

(Collection Zone) A Python expression that the event processing service uses to determine whether to change the class of an event. For more information, see the event mapping and transforms topic.

A diagram of the relationships among data points, thresholds, or both, over a specific period of time.

One or more properties associated with an entity, metric, or event.

Any entity attribute that is not a dimension attribute. The value of a metadata attribute can change.

See Also dimension attribute.

A measurement that quantifies an entity property or phenomenon.

Example metrics include input/output operations per second (IOPS), CPU utilization, network interface throughput, and the amount of free space on a block device.

The attributes and metadata that may appear on any metric. When Virtana Service Observability receives metrics from sources other than Collection Zones — such as APIs and OpenTelemetry collectors — it also receives extra metadata with those metrics, such as attributes. Those attributes are metric fields. As a Virtana Service Observability administrator, you can use the metric fields dictionary to add user-friendly labels to these machine-generated attributes on metrics. The metric fields dictionary differs significantly from the metrics dictionary: while the metrics dictionary provides detail and context for a given metric name, the metric fields dictionary describes the fields (or attributes) that accompanied a metric, not the metric itself. For more information, see the Dictionary service topic.

The determinate characteristics of an entity, including its relationships with other entities, if any.

(Collection Zone) A named object that associates data sources, thresholds, and graph definitions with a device or device component. For devices, a monitoring template also includes a device class. Monitoring templates define what and how to monitor, and how to present data points.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA), also known as two-factor authentication (2FA), provides an extra layer of protection against cybersecurity threats. In addition to the standard credentials of a username and password at login, MFA requires an additional security code generated dynamically on another device. For more information, see the Log in to Virtana Service Observability topic.

(Virtana Service Observability) A one-way message sent by the action service.

(Collection Zone) A named object that associates one or more triggers with an action. Example actions include sending email to a list of recipients and running a command.

See Also rule.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open source observability framework that helps IT teams collect, process, and export telemetry data, such as traces, metrics, and logs. OTel provides a standard format for capturing and exporting telemetry data from cloud-native applications and infrastructure. For more information about telemetry data in Virtana Service Observability, see the Graph tile topic and the Dictionary service topic.

An implicit or explicit way to group devices.

Device classes are implicit organizers. Explicit organizers enable arbitrary groupings of devices and device components in the Collection Zone interface.

For more information, see the Organizers topic.

On Smart View pages, the first metric tile on the anchor card.

For more information, see the Smart View topic.

An indicator of the degree of importance of an entity to your organization. Priority provides a relative measure of importance, such as "Low" or "High", to help you narrow down a large set of entities. For more information, see the Inventory topic.

The operational status of an entity in the monitored environment. Production state tracks whether an entity is fully operational (Production) or currently in maintenance (Maintenance). Virtana Service Observability uses the production state of an entity to determine whether the entity is monitored. For Collection Zone data, Virtana Service Observability uses production state to determine whether to collect data from the monitored entity. For more information, see the About production states topic.

An entity that has a dependency relationship with another entity.

A combination of one or more triggers, one or more destinations, and a customized message.

One or more data points in a specific time range; typically, metric data points.

Continuous monitoring of web application uptime and responsiveness. For more information, see the Site Availability Monitor topic.

An AI-assisted tool for investigating the root cause of infrastructure or application issues, whether minutes or months past. For more information, see the Smart View topic.

A visualization in Smart View of an entity, events, or the data points of a metric.

Entity, metric, or event data that is sent to Virtana Service Observability without a Collection Zone.

For more information, see the About streaming data topic.

(Collection Zone) A named object that specifies the boundary value and comparison operator for the data points of a metric. Collection Zone services consider thresholds when metric data is received and create events when a data point satisfies one or more comparisons.

A rectangular area of a Smart View page or dashboard.

(Virtana Service Observability) A set of criteria that identify conditions in your environment. (Collection Zone) A named set of rules (Boolean expressions) that the event processing service uses to examine events.

See Also action, destination, rule, notification.

The percentage of time that a website is online and accessible to users over a given time period, such as hourly, daily, or monthly. You can monitor uptime of sites using site availability monitoring.

A virtual table defined by one or more queries. Views are used in data warehouse services like Google BigQuery.