By: Lora Johnson
Uncovering key issues in your Cisco UCS environment — like hardware faults, chassis temperature spikes and power supply failures — as they happen can determine whether your issues spread across the stack and cause issues to your mission-critical systems.
Leverage new functionality in Blue Medora’s Cisco UCS Management Pack fro vRealize Operations to gain end-to-end visibility in your Cisco UCS environment to clearly pinpoint problems as they arise.
Figure 1: UCS Overview Dashboard
The newest version of the management pack, which was released today, incorporates several new features, including:
- A new UCS Health Investigation dashboard
- Increased configurability for naming resources
- Support for vRealize Operations 6.2+
Along with this new functionality, the existing features within the Cisco UCS Management Pack focus on driving better performance across your environment — in this blog post, we’ll highlight several key features of the management pack.
Key Relationships
Extend monitoring from adding additional metrics to also include relationship mapping, where you can understand how compute impacts other layers of the IT stack. As a result, you can drill down to see the root-cause of issues.
Within the Cisco UCS Management Pack from Blue Medora, you can leverage relationships from fabric interconnects to the Cisco UCS server and ESX/i host and other objects. This depth of relationship mapping gives you end-to-end visibility into the entire infrastructure hosted by or affected by a single UCS server.
As a result, you can quickly sort virtual machines that are running on monitored UCS hardware. If a mission critical piece of your infrastructure goes down, you can immediately track down the issue.
Object Monitoring
Take your monitoring beyond what’s traditionally included in key metrics about the compute layer down to specific objects, including fans, power supply units, vNic and vHBA.
Figure 2: UCS Blade Dashboard
The ability to monitor specific objects and measure key metrics against their performance ensures that you can track minor changes, such as an increase in temperature, so you can proactively address issues.
Reporting and Dashboards
With the ability to monitor more than 280 performance metrics, drive better visibility across your Cisco UCS environment. Key performance metrics available in the management pack include:
- Port utilization (%)
- Availability
- Operations Per Second
- Throughput
- Operability
View these key metrics in a series of out-of-the-box dashboards and reports, including the UCS Overview and UCS Health Investigation, to drill down to specific resources and their associated metrics, alerts, relationships and health.
Figure 3: UCS Health Investigation Dashboard
How to Get the Cisco UCS Management Pack
To learn more about the Cisco UCS Management Pack or to download a free trial, please visit the True Visibility Suite for VMware vRealize Operations page on Blue Medora’s website.
