VMworld 2019 Europe will start the first week of November, and attendees tell us it’s the best place to network, get trained, and have fun! If you’re attending, we’re excited to welcome you to the conference. To make it easier, here’s a guide so you don’t miss the operations management opportunities throughout the event, including: The post VMworld 2019 Europe: Operations Management Sessions appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a briefing from VMware on new upcoming releases of our beloved vRealize Operations, and today I can talk about them! vROps has really advanced tremendously in the last years and it is now for me the solution for monitoring in a VMware multicloud environment. The platform is well positioned for HCI operations (think vSAN, vxRail), hybrid cloud monitoring, app-aware operations, compliance use cases and the aforementioned multicloud.
vROps Cloud has been announced today. All SaaS offerings are now simply named ‘cloud’, so Log Intelligence will become Log Insight Cloud. Watch for other announcements this VMworld…. There will be a tech preview in Octobre – around VMworld EMEA I guess – and a beta early next year for launch around mid next year. It will require simple installation of a proxy in your network and registering a vCenter. VMware on AWS will be even simpler.
vROps v8 will also be available around Octobre. There are a lot of improvements in Workload optimisation and cost to include cloud services such as Amazon. The AWS and Azure management packs will now come with the product out of the box. I think there is a blog post necessary only to talk cost or workload optimisation. Let me concentrate here on a few other remarkable new features in intelligent remediation. Still my favourite use for vROps…
Troubleshooting workbench.
I will try to avoid some popular marketing terms here, but it is hard to do since this is an incredible new feature, with some stuff that learns … (get it ?) and one dashboard with all info to quickly troubleshoot a problem from app to infra…It gathers and correlates info on events, anomalous metrics and property changes. You can change time and topology to find out more and you can run multiple workbenches at once.
troubleshooting workbench
Application monitoring.
The new application monitoring using Telegraf agents is extended with 20 new applications and services! NTPD, Java, and Websphere are now supported and you can write custom monitoring scripts. These options bring vROps more and more in the APM space, along with the following novelty!
Native Service Discovery.
vROps now has built-in agent-less service discovery for 41 known services through vmtools! You can also add your own services to a white list. It will build application relationships and you can run agent-less VM actions for troubleshooting, like getting top-n processes.
Continuous availability.
vROps can now go beyond HA and replicate between sites over a layer3 network connection. So you can have a site failure and still access vROps. I know this is an important feature for large corporations with worldwide datacenters.
All in all vROps 8 and the SaaS offering offer some great new features. If you are a vSphere customer and are moving towards SDDC on prem and cloud offerings such as AWS, you would be well advised to take a closer look!
This is a little view that I created in vRealize Operations because of a customer issue. As you hopefully know in vROps 7.5 the idle VM detections is back. You can switch it on in the reclaim settings. On the home screen go to the Reclaim dashboard and click the wheel next to the title. Now you can switch on idle detection, powered-off VMs and snapshots. Even orphaned disks can be hunted down!
Switching on idle VM detection
The idle detection looks if CPU consumption in the chosen period is less than 100 MHz. The customer wanted to check also memory, disk and network access to decide on which VMs needed to be singled out for deletion.
I created a view using the new colorisation in v7.5. Attention! Colors only work in dashboards you create with this view or the view itself. In reports they do not show up.
I put in some specific parameters, but you can change them. CPU and memory color red if they use over 500 MHz or 500 MB respectively. Disk and network access go red over 100 kBps. CPU, memory, disk and network are sorted in ascending order.
Historic idle VM detection
The preview is on vSphere world. If you get VMs that are green for all metrics over a month, you know they are good candidates to delete… In the image above you see a preview in my little home lab…
We can now use this view in a dashboard so that we can click on a VM and get some more info such as the parent host and cluster and data stores. Well any excuse to use the exquisite new advanced object relations widget! The sparkline widget is used with the VM Capacity metrics to show the configuration of the VM. Of course you can build your own dashboard on top of this!
To use this in your environment download the zip file from VMware Code and unzip. First install the view by clicking on Dashboards, Views, Manage Views and import “historic idle detection view.zip”. Afterwards go to Manage Dashboards and import “historic idle VMs dashboard.zip” there. Both View and dashboard are now available in your environment.
I am very happy to announce I have been accepted in the new VMware vExpert Cloud Management program. This is a group focusing on vRealize Operations, vRealize Network Insight, vRealize Log Insight, and SaaS offerings Network Insight and Log Intelligence. We will interact with the business unit at VMware to evangelise these solutions!
VMware vExpert Cloud Management Program
A big thank you to the program leaders and congratulations to all colleagues! If you wonder who is part of the program, look at the directory.
I’ve been working with my colleague John Dias on a demo that involves deploying VMs via Cloud Automation Services and automatically configuring monitoring them with vRealize Operations. We needed a way to create Application and Application Tier objects during the provisioning process. Looking through the REST API documentation, there are no API calls specifically for The post vRealize Operations REST API: Create Application and Application Tier Objects appeared first on VMware Cloud Management.
… with my favourite tools.. vRealize Operations, vRealize Orchestrator and just installed the vRO plugin for vRops to link them. Expect some blog posts or talks coming! #vExpert
A while ago I recorded this video of how I show a demo of the Blue Medora management pack for VMware vRealize Operations. I think it can still benefit people to have a look at it.
In the recording I show the 3 most important features of Blue Medora management packs:
no agents to install, rapid deployment on vROps.
automatic import of data and, most important of all, automatic relations between objects. Even over management packs.
some custom dashboards installed.
I also show a full stack troubleshooting dashboard including NetApp storage, Cisco switches and UCS blades (a.k.a FlexPod) and a MS SQL database.
NetApp and Full stack demo.
Hope it is useful to you and let me know what you think.
Our second-to-none engineers have launched a utility today that has been developed internally to help with VMware vRealize Operations management: the vROps CLI tool! It is now publicly available for free on Github for linux, Mac and Windows on our public repository.
As you can guess this utility allows you to interact from the command line with your vROps instance: install adapters, list alerts,… And of course this opens the door to some nifty scripts to automate tasks in your environment… like installing those great new Blue Medora management packs:
One of the management packs for VMware vRealize Operations that has evolved the most over the past two years is the Pivotal Cloud Foundry solution. From connecting through our own open -source nozzle to using the BOSH API, Blue Medora now enables you to monitor all aspects of your PCF deployment, including apps. Today we publish yet another set of enhancements. This is one of the most comprehensive solutions on the market to monitor PCF and how it runs on your VMware environment.
PCF infrastructure dashboard
Features in this Release Include:
Added BOSH Job resource kind, which serves as a catch-all resource for any BOSH job (including BOSH metrics) not covered by other previously-defined resource kinds (See: Resource Kinds and Relationships)
Improved alerts and recommendations to align with PCF Key Performance Indicators best practice documentation (See: Alerts)
Added one new Advanced Configuration setting: Collect Events (See: Creating an Adapter Instance)
Updated Blue Medora Nozzle Tile to include timeseries for historical data to enable improved alerts (NOTE: Be sure to upgrade the management pack prior to upgrading to the new nozzle version. See: Upgrading the Management Pack.)
