In the past we have shown you how to manage your Business Critical Applications (BCA) in vCenter Operations Manager. To do this right we walked you through modeling the application and building tiers, creating supermetrics and KPIs and adding business context to the applications by associating them with lines of business, regions, owners, support levels. We also helped you create custom dashboards for difference personas to help them understand the status and overall health of these BCAs (not too detailed for the CxO but deep dive for the support teams).
We have also talked about the 3rd party Management Packs that are built by our management partners (EMC, Brocade, HP, Dell, NetApp, etc). The released versions of these are posted to VMware Solutions Exchange (https://solutionexchange.vmware.com) and take only a matter a minutes to download and install and provide you visibility into the neighboring technologies that help drive virtualization (e.g. storage).
Today I hope to show you WHY you would want to manage your BCAs in vCenter Operations Manager and the VALUE of bringing in “extra” party data. We will walk through a common degraded health scenario and talk about how you could use the dashboards and the data to solve a real problem with an application.
For reference, this video is from our demo lab environment where we have:
- Implemented a number of BCAs (SAP, Oracle, SQL Server, Exchange, Custom Apps)
- Implemented data feeds from Management Packs for Hyperic, SCOM, Oracle, EMC, Brocade, HP, Dell, SQL Loader, SAP, etc
- Built custom dashboards and implemented out of the box dashboards from Management Packs
Enjoy!
