By: Jon Lake, Blue Medora
How many different hardware and software systems do you use in your IT environment? NetApp storage, Dell servers, Cisco Nexus switches, VMware VMs & datastores, and Microsoft SQL databases just start to scratch the surface of what’s available to build out your IT infrastructure. Combine those systems, each of which comes with its own platform to monitor performance, manage the system, and send alerts, and you’ve got a full-fledged IT administrator’s nightmare on your hands.
So the question becomes: Is there a way to consolidate the monitoring of these disparate systems?
Here are just a few of the challenges you might be up against in your current, silo’ed IT management set-up:
- Is there a way to correlate alerts between each system?
- Say you have some degraded performance on a NetApp LUN. Is this issue going to affect your month-end SQL reports?
- Typically, a storage admin wouldn’t know if the VMware admin has vMotioned the SQL virtual machine to a different datastore than where it was originally placed, and the DBA is likely also unaware. Is there an easier way to facilitate communication and planning between the IT admin teams?
- Does your Tier 1 Network Operations Center have a way to correlate events to pinpoint the actual issue?
With these challenges in mind, here are three reasons why a centralized monitoring platform is so important when it comes to monitoring your IT infrastructure:
1. See the whole picture.
Using vRealize Operations, all admin teams gain visibility into the entire stack, from the VMware VM down through the hypervisor and further down to the storage system it resides on. Adding third-party management packs to your vROps investment, such as those offered by VMware’s leading third-party extension provider, Blue Medora, broadens the capability of mapping objects like NetApp LUNs to VMware datastores, SAP systems to VMs, and the Dell compute layer to a hypervisor.
2. Consolidate your IT management systems.
vRealize Operations, combined with Blue Medora’s Management Packs, provide extended resource monitoring and management capabilities in the form of dashboards, views, reports, capacity planning, alerts/recommendations, and more. Imagine your entire IT environment being monitored by a single platform, stretching your IT budget further and eliminating the need to purchase additional third-party tools for SQL, network, or business-critical applications.
3. Automate management tasks.
Centralizing your systems into a single IT monitoring and management platform allows for delegating simple fixes for Network Operations teams that can be automated through vRealize Operations. Teams are able to work together more efficiently and put together workflows that will provide an overall better service to the business.
Now that we know why a consolidated monitoring is so important, we can utilize vRealize Operations to correlate alerts between each system, facilitate communication and planning between the IT admin teams, and quickly pinpoint the issue at hand. For more information on vRealize Operations management packs mentioned in this blog, please visit the product page on Blue Medora’s website.
