Zenoss Inc., the leading provider of unified monitoring and analytics solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructure and applications, today announced the availability of its new ZenPack for Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC).

The unifying point of automation and management for the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) fabric is the Cisco APIC. It provides centralized access to all fabric information, optimizes the application lifecycle for scale and performance, and supports flexible application provisioning across physical and virtual resources.

"For the last several years, Zenoss and Cisco have been partnering around a common goal of giving enterprises and service providers a way to ensure reliable service delivery," said Alan Conley, CTO and Senior Vice President, Product Development at Zenoss. "This collaboration has resulted in the creation of solutions uniquely tuned to meet the demands of virtualized converged infrastructure. Cisco's model-based, policy-driven APIC offers next generation networking which aligns with Zenoss' similar model-based, policy-driven approach to provide real-time Service Impact analysis."

The new Cisco-oriented ZenPack has been designed specifically to help with Cisco ACI "Day 2" operations, which includes running a new ACI infrastructure, managing faults, identifying and correcting capacity issues, and more. Key capabilities in the new APIC ZenPack include:

• Discovery-Discovers tenants, applications, application endpoint groups, contracts, including contracts provided and contracts consumed, bridge domains, fabric pods and fabric nodes, line cards, aggregate interfaces, and CPUs.
• Performance Monitoring- For all discovered components, monitors and thresholds on the overall health score of the component.
• Event Management- Monitors APIC devices for faults, and when faults occur, turns faults into events in the Zenoss unified web interface. The Zenoss event lifecycle process closely mirrors the event lifecycle approach used by the APIC, which means that as events change over time and clear, these changes are tracked and displayed in real-time in the Zenoss web interface.
• Service Impact- Zenoss supports both infrastructure and application service impact models. When you add a Cisco APIC device to Zenoss, Zenoss takes the top-level tenant and application services defined in the APIC and automatically creates a network infrastructure model that shows the network devices and components in the Cisco ACI, along with their relationships. This ensures that your infrastructure and application service impact models are real-time, even in highly dynamic, virtualized cloud environments.
• Reporting and Analytics- All data collected from the APIC is available for analysis and ad-hoc report creation.

For businesses running converged infrastructures with Cisco ACI networks, Zenoss also provides the Cisco UCS ZenPack, which makes it possible for organizations with Zenoss Service Dynamics to automatically link ACI tenant and application networks to a single, end-to-end view of their computer, virtualization, and storage infrastructure. Using a combination of the existing Cisco UCS ZenPack, the Cisco Devices, the VMware vSphere, and either the NetApp  or EMC  ZenPacks, Zenoss can monitor a complete Cisco converged infrastructure today using a single pane of glass.