Part 15: Re-initiate Monitoring Goals Wizard in vRealize Operations 6.0!

One of the post in my vROps 6.0 Tutorial was about understanding the Monitoring Goals in vROps 6.0. I would highly recommend that you read that post before you read this article as this one is a follow up on that post where at the end I mentioned :

"As I mentioned before, any changes to the policy now cannot be done through this wizard. You would have to manually edit the policy now to make changes or you could use my next post where I will tell you a hack which will allow you to re-run this wizard once again."

The above statement means that once you setup a vCenter Adapter to monitor a vCenter Server, you would be asked to define your monitoring goals. These monitoring goals basically translate into the default policy which are then applied on all the objects which are being monitored by that vROps instance. When you read the above mentioned article you would understand how this wizard helps you set the policy for the first time. Unfortunately, you can only run this widget once and set the default policy and to make any subsequent changes to the policy, you would have to manually edit the default policy which could be a cumbersome task if you are not well versed with how policy works!

While you do not have the option to re-run the wizard, there is a hack which was discovered when this question was asked by my colleague Woflgang Stichel who is a Business Solution Architect at VMware. His question was that one of his customer has not selected the right options while responding to the monitoring goals because of which vROps default policy is not monitoring the datastores at all. He wanted to re-run this wizard somehow to select the right options instead of diving into the policies.

Before I share the hack with you, I must mention that this is NOT a supported method and please do it at your own risk :-)

Part 14: Can I deploy vROps Cluster Nodes Across Two Sites?

YOU CAN, BUT YOU MAY NOT!!

This might be the weirdest way to begin a blog post but I wanted to put this word out, loud and clear! Since the release of vRealize Operations 6.0, we all know that vROps can be deployed in a cluster architecture with multiple nodes which bring in resiliency and scalability to the solutions by just adding a node to an existing cluster. I have discussed this architecture and the benefits of the same in an article before. 

In that article I have also highlighted that you should deploy vRealize Operations Manager Cluster within the same site as that is the requirement for deploying the solution. Since then, their have been a number of occasions when I have been asked this question as people want to use the cluster architecture to their advantage and deploy the solution across sites to ensure that the cluster is alive even if one of the sites completely fails.

This across site cluster deployment will not work if it is more than a 2 NODE cluster, because vROps nodes randomly distribute data to the nodes in the cluster while storing a copy of the same in some other node, there is no way that those nodes will always be in different sites always (you cannot control that). Hence imagine you have a 4 node cluster and the N1 and N2 are in Site A while N3 and N4 are in Site B. A metric collected by N1 can be replicated as a copy on N2, N3 or N4 and you do not have any control over it, hence if a metric is copied to N2 and the Site A fails, then you will lose that data, hence this solution cannot be a across site solution.

Part 13: The Power of Alert Definitions in vRealize Operations Manager 6.0!

With the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0, I have started this series which gives you a scoop on how does this new release looks like and works. In my humble opinion this release of the product is way more mature from the previous release as it gives you a plethora of options around capacity and performance management which were not available with the previous release.

While the traditional monitoring softwares look at Key Performance Indicators and always work with the defined thresholds, vCenter Operations Manager (previous release) gave a new meaning to the world of monitoring by using the concept of Super-Metrics. In simpler terms, a supermetric is a value which is derived by using a mathematical operations on one or more metrics which are collected by vCOps/vROps. This results into a value on the basis of which it becomes easier to take decisions. These decisions can be around troubleshooting performance issues, capacity augmentation or capacity reclamation. 

The return of the One Click Cluster Capacity Dashboard on vROps 6.0

Let me begin this post by thanking all the readers of vXpress who voted this year during the TopvBlog2015 survey. I am happy to share that your support and encouragement has helped vXpress retain a spot in the Top 50 Virtualization blogs in the year 2015 as well by being ranked as number 38 in the world. Here are the full results of this years ballot.  I will continue to share my experiences through this blog and I hope that the quality and the quantity of the content increases this year as compared to the previous year.

On this note, I should share that in March 2014, I wrote a post on creating a one-click cluster capacity dashboard in vCOps. I must say that the response I got on that post was enormous and that dashboard was replicated in hundreds of vCOps installations across the globe. Since the release of vRealize Operations Manager, I have received an over-whelming amount of requests to re-create the one click cluster capacity dashboard on vROps 6.0. I should mention here that the dashboard which I created with vCOps 5.x would not work with vROps 6.0, since a number of metrics have changed in vROps 6.0 and the one which remain are also laid in a different pattern within the database.