A few weeks ago, we asked customers to share success stories using the new Troubleshooting Workbench in vRealize Operations 8.0 and we got some great responses! Thanks to everyone who submitted, and we appreciate the feedback because it helps us make a better product for you.
A special congratulations to our winners, Lucas Bernadsky, Sajag Chaturvedi and Ryan Ingram. They each were rewarded with a $100USD Amazon Gift Card for sharing fantastic stories of their usage of the Troubleshooting Workbench to quickly tackle issues in a real environment, providing proof that this feature, even in the initial release, allows customers to leverage powerful AI in vRealize Operations in a user-friendly way.
By the way, I corresponded with each of them and even without the gift card they were eager to share how much value they get from vRealize Operations daily.
Tier 0 System Misconfigured
In this submission, Sajag, working at his former employer, showed how Troubleshooting Workbench not only correlates performance metrics but also property changes.
After the maintenance of one of the most critical Tier 0 systems, we were getting reports in terms of performance from application team, we just simply used the [Troubleshooting] workbench feature and found out that the admin had accidently changed the CPU configuration which was not in line with memory, and heap of the system not able to start the DB in that VM. Saved us good time and relieved without business impact.
When troubleshooting, it is critical to be able to answer the question “what changed?” because the answer to that question is likely the root cause. User activity, such as configuration changes, are a leading cause of issues and Troubleshooting Workbench allows you to quickly see those changes in context with changes in performance. Awesome story, Sajag!
Solving a Backup Mystery
Ryan, Principal Infrastructure Engineer of Hosting at his employer, shared how Troubleshooting Workbench quickly provided insight into an issue anyone in IT Ops has dealt with before – failed backups!
A critical data analysis VM was failing backups. The storage and backup team asked for help, using [Troubleshooting] workbench showed that VM tools had stopped running the day previously during the previous backup cycle. I then restarted VM tools which resolved the quiesce issue.
Backup failures can be some of the most annoying issues to address; backups are important but it’s hard to justify spending time troubleshooting them when there are other, more pressing production issues. Getting to the root cause quickly ensures that critical backups continue to run, so that SLAs for business continuity are met. Thanks, Ryan!
Scope and Depth – Setting the Context
I personally love this story from Lucas, Support Specialist at Wetcom in Buenos Aires, who shares another issue caused by a configuration change. Note the use of scope and depth settings in Troubleshooting Workbench to help focus the collected evidence for faster troubleshooting.
We had been notified of a VM having performance problems. After looking the VM and host health for about 15 minutes, we took a look at the [Troubleshooting] Workbench view of the VM. Thanks to that, we saw that a VM that had been resized from 4 cores, up to 40 cores and DRS set to manually! As it was using a passthrough PCI device, the VM had all CPU capacity reserved, so we managed to solve really quickly an issue that could have taken at least 30 minutes to an hour long. In this case, we used the Scope and depth feature
Nice work, Lucas! And good advice for other customers in using the Troubleshooting Workbench. Use the scope and depth controls as part of your analysis to adjust the types of objects included and the time range used by the AI in vRealize Operations.
Find Out For Yourself
If you are a vRealize Operations customer and haven’t yet explored what’s new in vRealize Operations, including the Troubleshooting Workbench … what are you waiting for? Upgrade and get faster time to resolution for issues along with other valuable enhancements.
New to vRealize Operations and want to see for yourself what it can do in your environment? Download a trial today and get started using vRealize Operations in minutes. Like Sajag, Ryan and Lucas, I know you will find you cannot live without vRealize Operations!
