By: Jake Martin, Blue Medora
With the introduction of FlexPod solutions, IT efficiency has increased dramatically. Not only does it cut down deployment time, but also administration time. While these improvements are extremely helpful to all IT departments, issues may still arise. Monitoring the individual systems within a FlexPod solution will help to maintain uptime and efficiency.
For example, if a number of virtual machines within a company’s finance department begin to act sluggish, suffer from random disconnects, or just become outright unavailable, a good monitoring solution could quickly identify and present resolutions to these issues. Fortunately, Blue Medora has released a FlexPod Bundle that provides in depth monitoring and analytics on all the subsystems of a FlexPod Solution.
Using vRealize Operations Manager, the FlexPod Bundle allows administrators to drill down quickly and easily into NetApp hardware to identify latency issues, high IO requests, or a number of other latency issues. In Figure 1 below, we can quickly see that the Kraken12-DS Datastore has a low health score and could easily be causing issues within the finance department.
Figure 1 – NetApp Datastores Dashboard within vROps
By viewing the alert on the affected datastore we are able to see that it has lost connectivity to its storage device. This would cause the VMs on the datastore to be inaccessible.
Figure 2 – Detailed Alert information within vROps
If your NetApp hardware shows no issues and is performing as expected, you will need to look at other aspects of the FlexPod Solution. The UCS Relationships dashboard, shown in Figure 3, will help to identify any potential issues within UCS you could be experiencing. In this case, one of our Host UCS Systems has been labeled with a low health score of 25.
Figure 3 – UCS Relationships Dashboard within vROps
Before even drilling down into the UCS System, we are able to identify large spikes in memory utilization and slightly erratic CPU usage. With a quick look at events and alerts, you should be able to quickly identify the cause of the low health score.
With the latest rendition of FlexPod, a networking solution is included as well. Cisco Nexus takes on the task of ensuring all your systems are connected. If networking connectivity is unreliable or suffers from slow downs it can provide a central point for diagnosis and troubleshooting.
With the widget within the Cisco Nexus Relationships dashboard, displayed in Figure 4, we can quickly navigate to the switch and identify any ports that have issues. As you can see multiple ports within the switch are affected with various issues and therefore bring the overall health score of the switch down.
Figure 4 – Cisco Nexus Switch widget with vROps
If the issue continues to be elusive, a broader overview may be required. If necessary you can view top-most level of your system and drill down from there.
Figure 5 – FlexPod Overview dashboard within vROps
Overall with a centralized monitoring, access, deployment and troubleshooting point, you can be sure to get the most out of your FlexPod Solution. If you would like more information or a free trial of Blue Medora’s vROps Bundle for FlexPod, please visit the product page.
