vbulosity

Without much fanfare, VMware released vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) 6.3 right before  VMworld 2016 . vROps is VMware's popular Cloud and Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) monitoring and analytics solution. Besides the usual  enhancements to most features including c onfiguration, licensing, alerting, reports, policies as well as introducing some new dashboards and widgets, this release is jampacked with hidden gems all over the place.  A number of bug fixes were also included. This post will elaborate on some of the new features and enhancements beyond what was provided in the press release. So read on because there are some cool things that VMware omitted from the official release materials that are well worth you time.

A customer recently asked if it was possible to compare the same metric from multiple VMs in a single dashboard. Yes it is, and here is how it's done and what such a dashboard may look like. This type of dashboard is very useful if you want to evaluate and compare performance of several VMs carrying out the same or similar work. For example, it could include a number of load balanced web front-ends or some other VMs hosting a number of different enterprise applications. It can also be used to compare how similar VMs perform on different vSphere Hosts running on different generation hardware. Of course the same concept can be applied to comparing different vSphere Hosts or Datastores themselves.

Since the  EPOps vCenter Monitoring Dashboard is one of the most popular posts on the blog, I thought it would be a good idea to update this highly demanded dashboard to work with multiple vCenters. A lot of sizable enterprises out there have multiple vCenter instances with thousands of hosts and tens of thousands of VMs. Also, with the introduction of vSphere 6, more customers have begun their migration journey away from Windows-based vCenter servers to vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and everything in-between, including a mix of both solutions.  Since vROps enables you to have a unified single pane of glass view across your entire environment regardless of locations or versions, you can leverage it to create a dashboard to keep an eye on all of your vCenter servers. This can include both Windows and VCSA versions of vCenter, as well as SSO and PSC if they have been separated out. Heck, you can even include the MS SQL server hosting the vCenter database if you want.

As I mentioned in my previous vROps Self-Monitoring Dashboard  post, you need a way to get notified when vROps self-monitoring alerts get triggered. This way you don't have to keep staring at the dashboard all day and can rest assured that if something goes awry you will find out. Even though vROps is deployed as a Virtual Appliance (VA) in most environments, it is important to remember that under the hood it is still just another application with services running in an Operating System. Therefore, just like any other application, it is susceptible to failure at some point.  In this post, I will go over how to setup simple email notifications for  vROps self-monitoring alerts if there is an issue with one of the vROps objects such as Cluster, Nodes, or one of the application services.

While working with vROps over the past year or so, I have had quite a few customers ask for a "Monitor the Monitor" type dashboard. I thought about it and decided that this would not only come in handy when trying to keep an eye on the vROps' health, but also provide some basic capacity and performance stats. The capacity part of this dashboard could be especially useful when planning an analytics cluster upgrade or when adding a significant number of new objects and metrics to monitor, empowering you to make more educated scaling decisions. (See my previous posts " When and how to scale your monitoring solution? " about resizing your vROps Analytics Cluster to meet the needs of your growing environment.)  Normally, all this info has to be gathered from several places within the product, which may be too overwhelming for a casual product user. So, the goal of this dashboard is to provide all of the useful nuggets of information in a si...

This is part 2 of the  Custom Dashboard Design post from couple weeks ago. As promised in part 1, we will take a stab at adding more complications to our basic DIY dashboard design. Our focus will be on adding more widgets and creating more sophisticated interactions. So, l ike a fine swiss watchmaker, we will refine our plain dial with additional subdials and apertures giving our users more subtle functionality.

I think that Custom Dashboards are one of the most powerful features in vRealize Operations Manager (vROps). They enable you to commission and build compelling frames of view, almost like paintings, into your virtual or cloud environment. These dynamic paintings can tell the user a story and empower them to make educated decisions about many facets of a Software Defined Data Center. So, you want to start building your own Custom Dashboard in vROps but don't know where to start. Do custom dashboards seem a little overwhelming and a bit like black magic? Well, maybe a little, but with understanding of some basic concepts, I will try to demystify this artform and make you a dashboard ninja in no time. To get you started, we will begin with a very simple but somewhat powerful dashboard, build on it to add more functionality, and finally move on to some more complex use cases. Hopefully by the end of this series, you will be able to dream up your own dashboards and impr...