By: Ember DeBoer
If you are already a user of vRealize Operations, you know that vROps provides powerful dashboards to monitor your virtual environment. But did you also know that by extending vROps with Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite for VMware, you can gain visibility into all layers of your IT stack, including what’s happening in the underlying storage layer?
In today’s post, I’ll highlight three of the top storage-centric, out-of-the-box dashboards made available in vRops as part of Blue Medora’s True Visibility Suite.
#1: EMC VMAX IOPS Dashboard
If EMC VMAX (now Dell EMC VMAX) is the main storage component in your organization’s SAN, the management pack for Dell EMC VMAX can help consolidate your IT monitoring to a single console. As part of that management pack, the EMC VMAX IOPS dashboard integrates key performance indicators (KPIs) from your VMAX volumes—as well as related datastores and virtual machines—in a single dashboard, providing insight from the storage to virtual layers all in one place.
Figure 1: The EMC VMAX IOPS Dashboard.
#2: NetApp FAS QoS Dashboard
For storage admins taking advantage of NetApp’s QoS workload management for their NetApp FAS systems, the QoS dashboard, offered as part of the management pack for NetApp FAS, can be invaluable. You’ve already taken steps to set capacity limits to help manage system performance spikes. Now, this dashboard allows you to keep tabs on a slew of those QoS-related metrics—such as QoS Max IOPS, QoS Max Throughput, Read/Write Latency, and Used Capacity Percent—for key NetApp storage resources such as volumes, LUNs, or VVOL LUNs.
Figure 2: The NetApp FAS QoS Dashboard.
#3: Nimble Storage Volumes Overview Dashboard
Finally, if your storage solution includes Nimble’s flash-based arrays, the Volumes Overview Dashboard provided out-of-the-box with the management pack for Nimble Storage, provides a comprehensive view of any storage volume-related information you may need. Just select a volume to see its overall health score, key volume and cache properties, any alerts that may need to be remedied, and of course metric graphs depicting capacity and cache performance over time.
Figure 3: The Nimble Volumes Overview Dashboard
As you can see, the ability to monitor your storage layer within vROps can easily be made a reality with the addition of one of Blue Medora’s storage management packs, or the True Visibility Suite for VMware. If you’re ready to gain true visibility, contact Blue Medora with any questions you have today!
