By: Bekah Suttner, Blue Medora
Converged infrastructures have broad appeal to IT administrators, offering a single management console, components optimized for performance, simplified scalability, and more. Something that’s not always easy about converged infrastructure is monitoring. Using individual solutions for each component in your infrastructure can be inefficient, especially if those solutions are developed for different platforms. Here we’ll take a look at a few ways to reduce complexity of your converged infrastructure using available management packs for vRealize Operations (vROps).
Figure 1 – The FlexPod Overview dashboard from the Bundle for FlexPod
The vRealize Operations Bundle for FlexPod contains management packs tailored to NetApp, Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus. Each management pack is a full monitoring solution with alerts, dashboards, capacity definitions, and more. Three additional dashboards that take a look at your entire FlexPod system are included in the bundle. Using these dashboards, you can view the health of your system as a whole, identify the root cause of active alerts on the system, and drill through the system to see how related resources are affecting performance throughout the environment.
Figure 2 – The FlexPod Alerts dashboard from the Bundle for FlexPod
Each management pack contains dashboards to keep you informed on the health, alerts, and relationships of your FlexPod resources. In all, the bundle contains 21 dashboards, 18 for the individual NetApp and Cisco components, and 3 FlexPod overviews. These dashboards place the key performance metrics of your FlexPod system right at your fingertips.
Figure 3 – The Vision Metrics dashboard from the VCE Vblock Management Pack
Blue Medora also offers a converged infrastructure monitoring solution focused on storage, network, and compute resources of VCE Vblock systems (the Management Pack for VCE Vblock). With a single management pack, this solution provides deep insight into Vblock architecture. It features 10 dashboards, with individual overview dashboards for storage, network, and compute.
Figure 4 – Relationships to internal (Vblock) and external (MS SQL) resources
So what are the advantages of monitoring converged infrastructure using vROps? First of all, it simplifies monitoring. You don’t have to track down monitoring solutions for each part of your system, and you don’t have to juggle multiple platforms to use your solutions.
Secondly, and perhaps most critically, you can find the relationships in your system. Converged infrastructures are convenient because all of the pieces fit together nicely. In the same way, if a piece is failing or unhealthy, its issues cascade through the infrastructure. Separated monitoring solutions won’t help you track issues through the systems; monitoring in vROps will. Using relationships, you can quickly find an issue’s root cause see where it’s affecting the internal system, the virtual layer, and the rest of your infrastructure.
If you’re interested in finding out more about these solutions, check out the documentation for the FlexPod and Vblock management packs. Leave a comment to let us know what your favorite converged and hyperconverged infrastructures are, and keep an eye on the Solution Exchange for upcoming releases of new converged and hyperconverged monitoring solutions.
