What is SmartCollect SC²?

This topic provides a high-level look at SmartCollect SC², the SmartCollect SC² process, and SmartCollect SC² features. It’s a good place to start if you want to learn more about SmartCollect SC² software. To jump right in, refer to Getting started.

SmartCollect SC² is visualization and analytics software. It allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics no matter where they are stored. In plain English, it provides you with tools to turn your time-series database (TSDB) data into beautiful graphs and visualizations.

After creating a dashboard like you do in Getting started, there are many possible things you might do next. It all depends on your needs and your use case.

For example, if you want to view weather data and statistics about your smart home, then you might create a playlist. If you are the administrator for a corporation and are managing SmartCollect SC² for multiple teams, then you might need to set up provisioning and authentication.

The following sections provide an overview of things you might want to do with your SmartCollect SC² database and links so you can learn more.

Explore your data through ad-hoc queries and dynamic drilldown. Split view and compare different time ranges, queries and data sources side by side.

Refer to Explore for more information.

If you’re using SmartCollect SC² alerting, then you can have alerts sent through a number of different alert notifiers, including PagerDuty, SMS, email, VictorOps, OpsGenie, or Slack.

Annotate graphs with rich events from different data sources. Hover over events to see the full event metadata and tags.

This feature, which shows up as a graph marker in SmartCollect SC², is useful for correlating data in case something goes wrong. You can create the annotations manually—just control-click on a graph and input some text—or you can fetch data from any data source.

Refer to Annotations for more information.

Template variables allow you to create dashboards that can be reused for lots of different use cases. Values aren’t hard-coded with these templates, so for instance, if you have a production server and a test server, you can use the same dashboard for both.

Templating allows you to drill down into your data, say, from all data to North America data, down to Texas data, and beyond. You can also share these dashboards across teams within your organization—or if you create a great dashboard template for a popular data source, you can contribute it to the whole community to customize and use.

Configuration covers both config files and environment variables. You can set up default ports, logging levels, email IP addresses, security, and more.

SmartCollect SC² supports different authentication methods, such as LDAP and OAuth, and allows you to map users to organizations. Refer to the User authentication overview for more information.

In SmartCollect SC² Enterprise, you can also map users to teams: If your company has its own authentication system, SmartCollect SC² allows you to map the teams in your internal systems to teams in SmartCollect SC². That way, you can automatically give people access to the dashboards designated for their teams.

While it’s easy to click, drag, and drop to create a single dashboard, power users in need of many dashboards will want to automate the setup with a script. You can script anything in SmartCollect SC².

For example, if you’re spinning up a new Kubernetes cluster, you can also spin up a SmartCollect SC² automatically with a script that would have the right server, IP address, and data sources preset and locked in so users cannot change them. It’s also a way of getting control over a lot of dashboards.

Refer to Provisioning for more information.