vROps Webinar 2017 - Announcing Part 2 : "Full Stack" monitoring with vRealize Operations Manager

As promised, vROps Webinar Series 2017 is back with the second episode of the year. Last time around we looked closely into the features of vROps 6.5 and as stated during that webinar, we will now show you how you can unlock the full capabilities of vROps using the extensibility of the platform.

If you have been following the Webinar Series, by now you have a complete visibility into the capabilities of vROps, when it comes to monitoring the vSphere infrastructure. While this infrastructure is important for the IaaS provider, what business cares about is Applications. The good news is that vROps provides you an extensible platform which can be leveraged to extend the product capability into any area where metrics exist. This could be at the layers of your Software Defined Datacenter such as Compute, Network & Storage, or in the Application Stack and it's tiers such as App, Web and DB.

While VMware provides a number of plugins which allow you to extend the platform capabilities into applications, they also leverage strategic partners such as Blue Medora to provide you with management packs which can go deep into applications to complete the "FULL STACK VISIBILITY" which is required in any IT shop.

To discuss this topic in detail and to bring life to the concept of  FULL STACK VISIBILITY, we will be joined by Craig Lee and Brock Peterson from Blue Medora joining me and Simon.


Here are the use cases we will cover during the session:

Use Case 1 - Full-Stack vSphere Monitoring

We will demonstrate covering the “Full-Stack” with going from the Oracle Database query level, through the application stack, down to the Netapp SAN’s disk that the VM is running on.


Use Case 2 - Amazon RDS Workloads

You can monitor your, no matter where it lives. vROps can be extended to monitor other platforms hosting your production applications. In this section, we’ll demonstrate monitoring Amazon RDS hosted production databases within vROps . 


Use Case 3 - Extensions to vROps

vROps can be extended in a variety of ways, including Management Packs, Loginsight, EndPoint Operations agents, and vRealize Business Suite. We’ll walk through what the various extensions means in terms of functionality. Finally, we’ll show how all of these are available via the VMware Solutions exchange and where you can start to customize your environment.

Special thanks to Blue Medora for participating in the Webinar Series and contributing to the vCommunity.

Here are the details: 👇👇👇

Session Title	Part 2 - "Full Stack" monitoring with vROps
Date	Tuesday, 9th May 2017
Time	1:00 PM to 2:30 PM Pacific Time
Speakers	Craig Lee & Brock Peterson (from Blue Medora)
Webinar Link	Click here to join the meeting
Save Invite	Click to save invite  👈

See you at the Webinar!!  👋👋👋👋

Automatically upgrade EPOps Agents using vROps 6.5

During the first episode of vROps Webinar Series, someone asked a question about how to upgrade the end point operations agents automatically using vROps UI. The feature is available with vROps 6.5 admin UI. The vROps 6.5 documentation is pretty comprehensive and one can easily find the steps here.

Here is the extract from that link with a simple procedure:

Upgrade the Endpoint Operations Management Agent:

You can upgrade the 6.3 or 6.4 version of an Endpoint Operations Management agent to a 6.5 version from the vRealize Operations Manager administration interface.

Prerequisites:

• Download the Endpoint Operations Management PAK file.

• Before you install the PAK file, or upgrade your vRealize Operations Manager instance, clone any customized content to preserve it. Customized content can include alert definitions, symptom definitions, recommendations, and views. Then, during the software update, you select the options named Install the PAK file even if it is already installed and Reset out-of-the-box content.

Procedure:

1. Log into the vRealize Operations Manager administration interface of your cluster at https://IP-address/admin.
2. Click Software Update in the left panel.
3. Click Install a Software Update in the main panel.
4. From the Add Software Update dialog box, click Browse to select the PAK file.
5. Click Upload and follow the steps in the wizard to install your PAK file.
6. After Step 4 of the install is complete, you return to the Software Update page of the Endpoint Operations Management administration interface.
7. A message that indicates that the software update completed successfully appears in the main pane.

If any of the agents have not installed successfully, rerun the upgrade steps and ensure that you have selected Install the PAK file even if it is already installed in the Add Software Update - Select Software Update page.

What to do next

You can view the log files from the vRealize Operations Manager administration interface > Support page.

Hope this helps!!

Using End Point Operations agent with vRealize Operations Manager

End Point Operations as a feature of vRealize Operations Manager is an area where I get a lot of questions. During a workshop with a customer today, I was asked about a number of things which rang a bell in my head. I spent some time with the customer to de-mystify a lot of apprehensions around EPOps and the conversation ended into a meaningful action plan.

The phenomenon of agreement in the IT world (especially operations) is rare and hence I think that it would be worth to share the findings with others who might be looking for similar answers. With the slow departure of Hyperic and End Point Operations becoming mainstream, it is important that customers who have use cases for monitoring beyond the hypervisor layer (which vROps does for you OOTB) have a clear visibility into where End Point Operations stands.

It is important to understand that Operations Management as a process is not limited to a tool or feature. If you walk-in into any medium or small sized customer environments, you will find a number of tools solving point problems. I am not saying that vROps can solve all the problems of the world, but I do see customers inclining towards tools consolidation and considering vROps as the mainstream platform which can help them reduce all the complexity while covering the most number of use cases they would have around Operations Management.

While I can go on and on about Operations, the scope of this post revolves around End Point Operations. The use cases are pretty specific, however they can go DEEP and WIDE as we are moving from the hypervisor layer and into the zone of Operating System, Middleware and Applications. If you have been into IT operations, you would quickly realize the complexity you need to deal with once you look at all of this data in silos using multiple tools. Hence, if a tool can provide capabilities for joining all the dots to give you a complete picture right from the physical hardware, up-to the response times of a transaction one is running on a OLTP platform ALL IN ONE PLACE, it is a easy sell.

The statement I just made is also known as the "HUNKY DORY WORLD". Only if it was this simple, many of us would not have a job :-)

End-Point operations in its current form, and time to come is eventually trying to solve this problem. Post the integration of EPOps solution within the vROps platform, the unified view is no longer a distant dream. Having said that, I have to be brutally honest in saying that this UNIFIED VIEW needs a great amount of expertise to ensure that it is build right. With the evolution of EPOps, I am glad to share that there are a number of solutions which VMware has been able to build and deliver and with this pace of delivery, I am sure there are a number of them on the roadmap (only if I was allowed to share the roadmap without an NDA ;-) ).

I must call out that the list I am about to share are the one's which are made by VMware. Blue Medora, a very close partner of VMware, has delivered a number of management packs and plugins with un-matched quality and they are worth exploring as well.

Here is the list of available vROps plugins for end point operations manager. These will help you monitor the applications and related services.

I would highly recommend that these should be tried in a Test/Dev environments to see if they meet your use cases and then deployed in Production. You can use the links to download the plugins and the related documentation for more details:-

RabbitMQ  - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/rabbitmq-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

JBoss EAP - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/jboss-eap-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Apache Tomcat - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/apache-tomcat-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager--2 

Microsoft Exchange - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/microsoft-exchange-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

PostgreSQL - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/postgresql-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager--2 

Pivotal tc server - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/pivotal-tc-server-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Active Directory - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/active-directory-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Microsoft IIS - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/microsoft-iis-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager 

Microsoft SQL - https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/microsoft-sql-solution-for-vrealize-operations-manager--2

Some best practices around installing management packs & EP Ops:-

• Ensure that you test them in a Dev environment. This includes, the metrics, the relationships, the new alerts and dashboards which are added by the pack OOTB.

• Once you have the POC done and content finalized, install the pack in Production.

• Disable all the OOTB Alerts and enable what you need. Customise them to meet specific use cases. It is always a good practice to disable all the alerts and clone the OOTB alerts (whichever you need). This will not impact the alerts you chose to keep during major product upgrades.

• Export any unwanted dashboards introduced by the management pack (for a backup) and delete them. This will help avoid clutter.

• You might want to be selective with your approach with deploying EP Ops as per the sizing done for your vROps deployment. If you plan to go beyond the capability of your vROps cluster, please expand it by using the Sizing calculator.

With this I will close this article. Hopefully the information above would tickle your brain to see how you can deliver the unified view which you always wished for.

Share your thoughts in the comments section and as always, Share the Post.. You never know who needs it!!