New to the VMware Solutions Exchange today, the Blue Medora VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for Cisco Networking allows you to monitor your entire Cisco Network environment within vRealize Operations.
By: Lora Johnson
Why monitor Cisco Networking inside vROps?
Your Cisco network is a critical component in your infrastructure, connecting your apps, databases, servers and storage so they can work together. With the Blue Medora VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for Cisco Networking, gain essential insight into the performance of switches, ports and workloads, along with the virtual layer it’s running on. Once installed, you can pinpoint network issues and risks before they impact the performance of your infrastructure and applications.
Figure 1: Capacity monitoring for your Cisco Network
The Management Pack for Cisco Networking integrates with key vROps features like badges, capacity definitions, dashboards, relationships, metrics and alerts. Badges and capacity definitions monitor the health, risk and efficiency of your Cisco network components, and the alerts (with recommendations) help you resolve problems quickly. The included dashboards and reports make it easy to view your network information exactly how you want to see it.
Gain visibility into the Cisco network with operational dashboards
With a series of out-of-the-box dashboards and reports, you gain essential visibility into the health, performance and availability of your Cisco Networking workloads, switches and ports. Dashboards include:
- Cisco Networking Overview: At-a-glance heatmaps offering a quick view of the overall health of your Cisco Networking resources.
- Cisco Networking Performance: Sparkline graphs depicting key performance metrics for switches, related ports virtual machines and host systems.
- Cisco Networking Traffic: Drilldown dashboards that provide visibility into throughput and bandwidth utilization for your switches.
- Cisco Networking Switch Topology: Spatial mapping of switches to VMs, hosts and other switches to view network configuration at a glance.
- Cisco Networking Environment: Dashboards that showcase your Cisco Networking environment from top-level resources down through the hierarchy.
Figure 2: The Cisco Networking Environment Dashboard.
Understand performance and solve issues
The Management Pack for Cisco Networking collects and displays more than 150 metrics for Cisco Networking workloads, switches and ports, including key metrics like:
- Discards
- Error packets
- Throughput
- State code
- Packets (received, sent, etc.)
- Port status
Alerts from key metrics and events are also included for Cisco Networking workloads, switches and ports. These alerts are displayed in vRealize Operations and include detailed recommendations so you can remedy the issue at hand. Key alerts include:
- Switch Sensor Unavailable
- Switch Power Module Failed
- Switch Power Module Status: Off Env Other
- Port Down
- Port Testing
- Port in Errors are High
Figure 3: A sample alert with recommendations to resolve.
To learn more about the Management Pack for Cisco Networking or to download a free trial, please visit the True Visibility Suite for VMware vRealize Operations page on Blue Medora’s website.
