Monitoring vCenter Health Remotely with vRealize Operations – Part 2

By: Greg Hohertz, Blue Medora

In Part 1 of this blog, I discussed how you can monitor vCenter’s vPostgres database remotely using Blue Medora’s Management Pack for PostgreSQL. For those of you with larger environments with Oracle or MS SQL databases supporting vCenter, you’ll want to monitor those as well. In this blog I’ll step through how one can monitor a Microsoft SQL server remotely using vRealize Operations Manager. Similar steps can be taken to monitor an Oracle database remotely with Blue Medora’s Management Pack for Oracle. This includes setting up the requisite credentials on the SQL server, creating relationships to vCenter, and a custom dashboard that shows SQL performance for vCenter.

First, create a monitoring user on the Microsoft SQL database following the security standards and best practices in place at your company. At minimum, this user will require “VIEW SERVER STATE” and “VIEW ANY DEFINITION” on the SQL Server, and the “db_datareader” role on the vCenter database, which is “VCDB” by default.

Next, install the vROps Management Pack for Microsoft SQL, which will allow for remote monitoring of the SQL database. Follow the instructions found in the Installation and Configuration Guide, and configure it to collect data from the vCenter Microsoft SQL Server. This adapter will remotely collect data from your SQL Server and apply vRealize Operations’ predictive analytics, dynamic thresholding, reporting, dashboarding, and capacity planning for your vCenter database.

We’ll want to create a relationship between the vCenter Server and the Microsoft SQL database in vROps so that we can easily create some dashboards and navigate between the resources.

1. In vRealize Operations, navigate to Administration
2. Select “Object Relationships”
3. On the left-hand side, expand “Object Types”
4. Find “vCenter Server” and left-click on it
5. In the next pane over, select your vCenter server by left-clicking on it
6. In the right-hand pane, expand “Object Types”
7. Find “MS SQL Server” and left-click on it
8. In the second from the right pane you see your Microsoft SQL instances that are monitored by vRealize Operations. Select the database which supports your vCenter and drag it over to the vCenter server in the pane to the left.
9. We now have a relationship in vRealize Operations from our vCenter Server to the SQL database which resides on it.

Figure 1 – Creating Relationship to vCenter Server

Next, we’ll import a dashboard which allows you to select your vCenter Server and see the Microsoft SQL Server supporting it, along with some capacity and health data. From here, you can customize the dashboard to add other metrics or use it to create your own custom dashboard to monitor your vCenter SQL database.

To import the custom dashboard:

1. Navigate to “Content”
2. Select “Dashboards”
3. Select the gear, and then “Import Dashboards”
4. Import “Blue Medora vCenter MSSQL.json” found in the zip file at the end of this article.

Figure 2 – vCenter Microsoft SQL Dashboard

Now we have a custom dashboard which will show SQL health relative to our vCenter server. Since we created the relationship between our vCenter and SQL server, we’ll also be able to see when SQL performance is affecting vCenter health. With vRealize Operations’ capacity planning capabilities, we’ll also be able to determine if our vCenter SQL database has sufficient memory, cpu, and disk allocated to it.