Part 1 - vCOps Extensions - Managing Operations Beyond Virtual Infrastructure

This is a season of Multi-Part Series on vXpress, especially around vCenter Operations Manager and Architecting vSphere. Sometimes this can mean that you need to wait for the next post in the series & I apologize for that. Since blogging is not a part of my Job, it becomes difficult sometimes to get all the content out at once. I write when I get to write which in the past few days has been difficult with lots happening in bother personal & professional life..

Anyways enough about me, lets talk about some COOL stuff which you can do with vCenter Operations Manager. With all my posts on vCOps, you must have noticed that all this while I was concentrating on using vCOps to manage the VMware Virtual Infrastructure. However with this exclusive series on vCOps Extensions, I would just focus and talk about the various plugins which are available to extend the vCenter Operations Manager Analytics engine to beyond your virtual infrastructure & to each nook and corner of your datacenter equipment. 

It is important to know that you need to be on Advanced/Enterprise edition of vCenter Operations Manager to use the capability of extending vCOps beyond the Virtual Infrastructure. 

Use Cases Beyond Virtual Infrastructure

Before I get into the the meat of this post, I wanted to share a use case which I was told about when I was first introduced to vCenter Operations Manager. In this case vCOps Custom Dashboard were used by a bank to fetch data from their EPBAX (Business Telephone Systems) into vCOps and then create custom dashboards for monitoring the call patterns which were coming into their call center. They could easily get call patterns and if their were abnormal call patterns in a particular queue, they would know it with the Anomalies feature of vCOps.

This would help to proactively know about the issues which their telephone lines, websites, internet banking systems etc might have or will have. This would also help them forecast the call patterns and workforce needs to handle them. I don't think their could be a better example of how creative you can get with vCenter operations manager.

Available Integrations

It is quite obvious that  their are a number of default integrations which are available today through adapters which can be easily installed and configured on your existing vCOps deployment and start bringing in the metrics from the third party resources such as storage arrays, networking equipment, applications etc. All such adapters are available on the VMware Solution Exchange Page for Cloud Operations Management.

As I write this post, there are 48 such management packs available which can be used for different purposes. There are more than 100 documents which can help you with the implementation of these management packs.

What's Next

With this series I will try and showcase some of the possible integrations which we can do with all I have in my PS Lab out here in India. I will post my experience with these integrations as and when I execute in the parts to come.

Soon coming out with the next part which is going to talk about monitoring the storage infrastructure with vCenter Operations Manager.

Stay tuned for more...

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