Part 3 - Operations Dashboards in vRealize Operations 6.6.

In my last post I gave you an overview of the new user interface of vRealize Operations 6.6 along with some other important enhancements. Do go through that post to get a context of what we are going to discuss here.

With the introduction of Getting Started page within dashboards, one of the categories which is available out of the box is called the "Operations".

Here is how operations shows up on the Getting Started Page:

The Operations category is most suitable for roles within an organization who require a summary of important data points to take quick decisions. This could be a member of a NOC team who wants to quickly identify issues and take actions, or executives who want a quick overview of their environments to keep a track of important KPIs.

Key questions these dashboards help you answer are :

• What does the infrastructure inventory look like?

• What is the alert volume trend in the environment?

• Are virtual machines being served well?

• Are there hot-spots in the datacenter I need to worry about?

• What does the vSAN environment look like and are their optimization opportunities by migrating VMs to vSAN?

Let us look at each of these dashboard and I will provide a summary of what these dashboards can do for you along with a quick view of the dashboard.

Datastore Usage Overview

The Datastore Usage Dashboard is suitable for a NOC environment. The dashboard provides a quick glimpse of all the virtual machines in your environment using a heatmap. Each virtual machine is represented by a box on the heatmap. Using this dashboard, a NOC administrator can quickly identify virtual machines which are generating high IOPS since the boxes representing the virtual machine are sized by the number of IOPS they are generating.

Along with the storage demand, the color of the boxes represents the latency experienced by these virtual machines from the underlying storage. A NOC administrator can take the next steps in his investigation to find the root cause of this latency and resolve it to avoid potential performance issues. 

Host Usage Overview

The Host Usage Dashboard is suitable for a NOC environment. The dashboard provides a quick glimpse of all the ESXi hosts in your environment using a heatmap. Using this dashboard the NOC administrator can easily find resource bottlenecks in your environment created due to high Memory Demand, Memory Consumption or CPU Demand.

Since the hosts in the heatmap are grouped by clusters, you can easily find out if you have clusters with high CPU or Memory Load. It can also help you to identify if you have ESXi hosts with the clusters which are not evenly utilized and hence an admin can trigger activities such as workload balance or enable DRS to ensure that hotspots are eliminated.

Operations Overview

The Operations Overview dashboard provides a high level view of objects which make up you virtual environment. It provides you an aggregate view of virtual machine growth trends across your different datacenters being monitored by vRealize Operations Manager.

The dashboard also provides a list of all your datacenters along with inventory information about how many clusters, hosts and virtual machines you are running in each of your datacenters. By selecting a particular datacenter you can zoom into the areas of availability and performance. The dashboard provides a trend of known issues in each of your datacenters based on the alerts which have triggered in the past.

Along with the overall health of your environment, the dashboard also allows you to zoom in at the Virtual Machine level and list out the top 15 virtual machines in the selected datacenter which might be contending for resources.

Optimize vSAN Deployments

The Optimize vSAN deployments dashboard is an easy way to device a migration strategy to move virtual machines from your existing storage to your newly deployed vSAN storage. The dashboard provides you with an ability to select your non vSAN datastores which might be struggling to serve the virtual machine IO demand. By selecting the VMs on a given datastore, you can easily identify the historical IO demand and latency trends of a given virtual machine.

You can then find a suitable vSAN datastore which has the space and the performance characteristics to serve the demand of this VM. With a simple move operation within vRealize Operations Manager, you can move the virtual machine from the existing non vSAN datastore to the vSAN datastore.

Once the VM is moved, you can continue to watch the utilization patterns to see how the VM is being served by vSAN.

vSAN Operations Overview

The vSAN Operations Overview Dashboard provides an aggregated view of health and performance of your vSAN clusters. While you can get a holistic view of your vSAN environment and what components make up that environment, you can also see the growth trend of virtual machines which are being served by vSAN.

The goal of this dashboard is to help understand the utilization and performance patterns for each of your vSAN clusters by simply selecting one from the provided list. VSAN properties such as Hybrid or All Flash, Dedupe & Compression or a Stretched vSAN cluster can be easily tracked through this dashboard.

Along with the current state, the dashboard also provides you a historic view of performance, utilization, growth trends and events related to vSAN.

In case you are like me, and don't like to READ. You can see the dashboards in action in this video playlist:

⏩See all dashboards in action here.

More to come.. Stay Tuned!!

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!!