Getting More Out of vRealize Operations: Day 2/3 Operations

By: Ryan Cartwright, VMware Senior Systems Engineer & David Kruse, VMware Staff Systems Engineer

Getting More Out of vRealize Operations webinar series is kicking off the 3^rd Quarter 2016 with a session called Day 2/3 Operations on July 13^th, 2016. Best practices on what you can achieve on Day 3 will be discussed after you have deployed vRealize Operations (vROps) and are collecting from at least one vCenter data source. In Q1 2016, David Kruse demonstrated best practices in what you can accomplish on Day 2. Please review this blog and webinar for details.

In Day 3, the primary focus is monitoring the Application. This session will demonstrate how to build the container object and all the objects supporting the application – dashboards, views, reports, super metrics, metric configurations, and alerts that will manage the application. A few weeks ago, John Dias delivered a session called Full Stack Application Monitoring on May 25^th, 2016. This was an excellent session that demonstrated the full power of using vROps as a comprehensive management platform for managing the application. This session will dive into the finished product that John presented and get you started on how you can bring this same value into your organization using vROps. If you were not able to catch John’s Getting More out of… session, I highly recommend you check it out.

Let’s take a look at what will be covered in the Day 2/3 Operations session.

Build and Create Application and Application Tier Groups

Building and creating the Application and Tier objects that will represent the Application that you are modeling and would like to manage. Don’t worry, you can start slow, and gradually build up the layers to the application stack. This webinar will show you both the preferred method, using dynamic groups, as well as the legacy method which is still supported today, Application and Tier objects.  Both are effective, but with the preferred method giving you the ability to have your container objects auto populate. In the below example, dynamic groups are built for the WOPR Application along with its Web, App and DB tiers.

Populate Groups

We will need to populate the Tier groups with more object types other than Virtual Machines. So for this demonstration, Windows and Linux OS object types will be added. In Step 6 of the Day 2 Operations webinar, End-Point Operations (EPOps) is discussed. This is an agent based technology that will collect OS and Application metrics and send this data directly to vROps.

Create the Dashboard

Next, a dashboard will be created to manage the WOPR application. You will see that we need to create some super metrics to get the desired results.

Create Super Metrics

As you can see in the dashboard, there are metrics being calculated for the Application object, the Web Tier, and DB Tier objects. These are derived metrics that are created with vROps super metrics, then applied to the correct object type.

Create a Log Insight Content Pack

So how did John Dias create that custom Dashboard with Log Insight within vROps? That was pretty cool, and very valuable for troubleshooting. In this demo, you will see how to add a Log Insight Dashboard within vROps using the text widget. We’ll also talk about how to create a Log Insight Content Pack for your Application.

Alerts and Symptoms

Understanding how Alerting and Symptoms work for Applications and their corresponding Tier objects is a very import topic. A basic understanding of the Group Object alert and how it can be modified will be illustrated. As usual, best practice is never to modify anything out of the box, but to clone this object first.

Create Notifications

In Day 2, we discussed outbound rules for sending alerts. In this session, we will discuss Notifications. It’s important that the right people receive the right alerts, at the right time.

Create a Maintenance Schedule

Every application, as minimal as it maybe, will have downtime for maintenance. Hardware/Software updates sometimes will cause application unavailability. During these maintenance windows, administrators and application owners do not want to get bombarded with alerts.  This session will demonstrate how to create a Maintenance Schedule, and how to apply it. (Hint: Policies)

Join us on July 13^th, where we will be answering your questions live about Day 2/3 Operations. This webinar will be a valuable use of your time.

Click here to Register!

Visit www.vmware.com/go/getmore to view the entire Getting More Out of VMware webinar series.