ZENworks 11.4.1 is coming soon! I would expect that by the end of next month, at the latest, you'll be notified of its availability in the System Updates page of the ZENworks Control Center (if you have automatic checking enabled) or in the ZENworks News feed. Once you've updated your environment to 11.4.1 you'll get a number of new capabilities that I will address in a couple of other upcoming posts. However, today I want to talk about the new telemetry feature we've built into ZENworks 11.4.1.

Telemetry is our first foray into collecting data from your zone that can help us better understand what features of the product you are using, what platforms are being run and other interesting statistical data. I expect that over time the type of information we collect will move from simple statistics in 11.4.1 to more sophisticated telemetry about how you are using the product, as we implement our next generation user interfaces. The purpose of all of this data is the same, we want to improve ZENworks so that you and your end-users have a better experience and we want to make better, data-driven,  decisions about things like platform support, scale testing and more.

By default, an 11.4.1 zone sends a few key pieces of information back to Micro Focus if the system is connected to the Internet. First, it provide a randomly generated customer identifier that ensures the backend system can uniquely identify data coming from a customer, so that as new data comes in the proper record can be updated. This identifier cannot be tracked back to your company unless you choose to opt-in and provide additional data. The following pop-up shows the other items that are collected by default in 11.4.1.



In addition to this default telemetry collection, there is Telemetry configuration screen shown below, that allows you to opt-in to sending additional statistical data back to Micro Focus.



There are effectively two opt-ins from this page. First, you can opt-in to sending the additional statistics. This includes information about things like a count of the agent components enabled on devices in the zone, operating systems for each agent and server, number of bundles, policies, patch policies, subscriptions, and more. You can see a full list of the data that we will collect by clicking the Optional Data link, which will display a pop-up similar to the one below:



The second opt-in allows you to provide us with customer information so that we can contact you in the future. This is especially useful for us because it means that if we see an anomaly or we are looking for focus group members that are using a specific feature then we can quickly and easily identify them.

As the Product Line Manager for the ZENworks portfolio I want to encourage you to opt-in to sending us as much information as you feel comfortable with. The more customers that we get this data from, the better the decisions we make will be. Additionally the more people that opt-in to non-anonymous telemetry the more likely we are to be able to have the right conversations with the right customers when trying to make critical product decisions. This will result in better decisions on our end, and hopefully a better experience on yours. So in the words of Jerry Maguire..."help me, help you" by opting into Telemetry in ZENworks 11.4.1.