vRealize Operations’ use of smart alerts, customizable dashboards, capacity analytics and predictive analytics allows system administrators to monitor their IT infrastructure better than ever before. With the help of our strategic partners in the Cloud Management Marketplace, we are aiming to further extend the capabilities of our Cloud Management solutions. This enables more admins to take vRealize Operations to the next level by expanding their monitoring capabilities to every layer of their application stack.
We currently have over 50 Management Packs in the rapidly expanding Cloud Management Marketplace, from application and database to compute and storage and much more. When combined with vRealize Operations best-of-breed predictive analytics capabilities, the value of your vRealize Operations installation grows exponentially.
What do vRealize Operations Management Packs Provide?
Each of these management packs can stand on its own. Individually, they provide insights into your hardware or application layer, all from within a single tool. But the “wow” factor goes through the roof when multiple vRealize Operations Management Packs are combined with one another and the VI admin gains end-to-end visibility across the entire stack.
A great deal of this value comes from the “relationships” feature within vRealize Operations. The power of relationships is to connect two or more Management Packs to one another.
For example, when you add the EMC Storage Analytics (ESA) Management Pack or the NetApp Storage Management Pack, the link between datastores and LUNs/volumes is automatically created. And, if you install the Oracle Management Pack, vRealize Operations will automatically detect the virtual machine where your databases reside. The end result is that the full application map is exposed from database to volume using vRealize Operations.
When an application starts to experience health problems, slows down or even crashes, the IT administrator has a tall order in hand. This can be a challenge because, often times, the root cause of the issue doesn’t actually reside in the application layer but it’s much deeper in the stack. The virtual machine, the datastore or even the compute or storage layers that the application is running on could be the source of the problem. This is the key challenge that the relationship-mapping feature of vRealize Operations solves. By enabling the administrator to have true visibility across their entire environment, issues like these can be quickly identified and remediated.
Figure 1: IT Admin has added the following Management Packs to manage their entire stack: Management Pack for Oracle Enterprise Manager, Management Pack for Cisco UCS and Management Pack for NetApp Storage.
Use Case
Let’s take a look at a common use case. The number one concern for an Oracle DBA is ensuring their production database never goes down.
Figure 1 shows a vRealize Operations Custom Dashboard that provides an “at a glance” view of the health of a critical Oracle database and the entire stack that the database is dependent on. The user is able to quickly visualize that fact that this specific Oracle database is running on Cisco UCS and NetApp storage. By selecting the Oracle database, the administrator is able to quickly see the health status of every related resource kind across the environment. In this case, we can see that the Cisco UCS Blade and Chassis are unhealthy. With one click we are able to find any health issues that may affect a production database. The administrator can now solve these issues before the database suffers any performance degradation.
This simple step avoids a serious and potentially costly outage, ensures your team doesn’t waste time finger pointing, and prevents issues from rising up the stack before they affect the application layer.
This scenario, where VMware vRealize Operations’ powerful native capabilities have been extended to both the application and hardware layers via the addition of external Management Packs, is a great demonstration of why we see our customers adopting vRealize Operations at a breakneck pace.
