Monitoring VSAN hardware using vRealize Operations Dashboard.

A few days back I mentioned about the general availability of the vRealize Operations Management pack for vROps in my article here. While building content for VMworld, I tried my hands on the management pack and the metrics which are generated by vROps through this adapter and I was amazed at the amount of detail which you can get about the health of your VSAN cluster. 

I tasked myself to use these metrics to monitor the key areas of the VSAN solution. A failure in these key areas in my opinion can impact the availability or performance and hence monitoring these areas is a key. With this post, I will share one of the many dashboards which I have created for VSAN and I hope they will be useful for you. I might not share the entire dashboard for you to download and import, as some of the widgets in the dashboards are static and might not populate in your instances.

With this dashboard, I am monitoring 3 key layers of the VSAN solution:

a) Solid State Drives - SSD's are the heart of any hyper-converged solution. The performance tier of VSAN is dependent on the SSD's, hence we all understand the importance of monitoring them for failures of wear and tear.

b) Magnetic Disks - This essentially is the Capacity tier of VSAN and monitoring this is as important as any other hardware component of the VSAN solution.

c) Host Adapter - The host adapter is another crucial component which has to be monitored as it provides access to the performance and data tier.

Here is the dashboard which I have built:

Let me quickly summarize the dashboard for you:-

• The first row is SSD Monitoring, where you can see a heatmap indicating the errors on a SSD in 7 different VSAN Clusters. If a SSD has an error the color & size of the column representing that SSD would turn black in color. You can select the faulty object and then click on the Resource Details icon to know more about the SSD Error and see if it requires a replacement by looking into the Recommendations from vROps.

• The second row is for monitoring the magnetic disks. This is built with the same logic like the previous row of SSD. A black color box means a problematic disk.

• The third row here is to monitor the adapter health. In this case I have faulty adapter and hence the same has been highlighted in black color on four VSAN Clusters.

Now if you want to create this dashboard in your environment, you would use the Text Widget for pulling up those icon images from an html page and use the heatmaps on the right to display the metrics related to those hardware objects.

Let's quickly run through the built:

Step 1 - Login to vROps.

Step 2 - Select Content -> Manage Metric Config (You must have vROps 6.0.1 or above)

Step 3 - Expand TxtWidgetContent

Step 4 - Click on the GREEN PLUS SIGN to add a new html.

Step 5 - Name the file sunny.html and paste the following code in the file and click on Save

sunny.html

"<!-- Codes by HTML.am -->

<!-- CSS Code -->

<style type="text/css" scoped>

img.GeneratedImage {

width:300px;height:225px;margin:10px;border-width:6px;border-color:#000000;border-style:solid;

}

</style>

<!-- HTML Code -->

<img src="http://icons.iconarchive.com/icons/thvg/slick-drives/512/SSD-Drive-icon.png" alt="Photo of the Remarkables mountain range in Queenstown, New Zealand." class="GeneratedImage">

"

Step 6 - Use the same steps to create the other 2 files. Here is the code and screenshot to guide you.

hdd.html

<!-- Codes by HTML.am -->

<!-- CSS Code -->

<style type="text/css" scoped>

img.GeneratedImage {

width:300px;height:225px;margin:10px;border-width:6px;border-color:#000000;border-style:solid;

}

</style>

<!-- HTML Code -->

<img src="http://pngwebicons.com/upload/hard_disk_PNG9180.png" alt="Photo of the Remarkables mountain range in Queenstown, New Zealand." class="GeneratedImage">

HOSTADAPTER.html

<!-- Codes by HTML.am -->

<!-- CSS Code -->

<style type="text/css" scoped>

img.GeneratedImage {

width:300px;height:225px;margin:10px;border-width:6px;border-color:#000000;border-style:solid;

}

</style>

<!-- HTML Code -->

<img src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/411qssJgDvL.jpg" alt="Photo of the Remarkables mountain range in Queenstown, New Zealand." class="GeneratedImage">

NOTE : PLEASE ENSURE THAT IF YOU DO NOT HAVE INTERNET CONNECTIVITY ON VROPS YOU WOULD NEED TO HOST THE ICONS SOMEWHERE ON AN INTERNAL WEBPAGE AND POINT OT THAT AS <img src= ON ALL THE 3 HTML CODES.

Assuming you are done with the icon hosting and those three html files, here is what you need to DOWNLOAD. The file you just downloaded is the export of the dashboard and you would just need to import the same in your environment and you should have the final dashboard.

let's see the steps to import it.

• Login to your vROps instance with an administrator account. (This could be to any instance of the cluster in case you are running a vROps Cluster).

• Click on Content - > Dashboards -> Actions -> Click on the Import Dashboard.
• Browse to the VSANHWDASH.json file and click on Ok.
• This will bring the VSAN HARDWARE MONITORING Dashboard in the list of dashboards which you have.

Feel free to reach out through comments if you have any questions!!