A "Zone" in Unimus can be abstractly defined as a group of devices without any IP overlap, polled (communicated with) over a single connection method.

Most usually, a single Zone in Unimus will be a single network (no IP addressing duplicity) polled over a Remote Core, or from the Unimus Server itself (using it's Embedded Core).
You can also use Zones as a means to distribute load from your main Unimus Server across multiple pollers (Cores).

Simply said, if you want to have a single central Unimus server, with remote networks polled locally from the inside of each network, you can:

This will achieve a fully distributed system which can be used to manage many network centrally.
Please refer to Architecture overview for more information.

Creating Zones

You can Create a zone in the "Zone menu".

Here you need to fill-in the Zone Name and an alphanumeric Zone ID.

You can also select the connection method Unimus will use to communicate with devices:

After you create a Zone, you can change the connection method at any time through "Edit Zone":

If this Zone is using a Remote Core, you can see the access key for this zone here as well.
When you are installing Unimus Core, it will ask for this access key during the deployment process.

Zone-based Tags

You can apply Tags to Zones as well. Any Tags applied to a Zone will automatically propagate down to all Devices within that Zone.
These Tag are fully applied for security restrictions, users that have Tag-restricted access will not see Zones that have Tags which these users can't access.

Combining Zone-based tagging (and Tag propagation) with Tag-based access restrictions allows you to easily specify users that have access only to specific Zones.

Core Load metrics

The "Load" values show the utilization of various sub-systems in the Unimus Core for the Core handling this Zone.
(if this zone is using an Embedded Core, all embedded cores will show the same load values)

Load values are:

These load values do NOT reflect on the CPU/RAM usage of the OS, but reflect the utilization of job handler thread-pools in the Core.