Virtualization Manager 8.4 is Now Generally Available
Virtualization Manager (VMAN) 8.4 is now available and can be downloaded from your customer portal. In recent releases, we brought you VMware vSAN monitoring, container support, and better centralized upgrades to your deployment overall.
VMware Event Monitoring, Correlation, and Alerting
As a virtualization admin, it's a primary concern to track the many changes that occur in dynamic and often automated virtualization environments. While many virtualization vendors tout that the simplicity of their solution alleviates the need for admins to worry, I err on the side of caution. With VMware event monitoring, you now have real-time access to alert and correlate VMware's alarms, health checks, events, and tasks to issues in your environment. Ephemeral events such as vMotions are now easily tracked, and if you also have Log Analyzer, you can tag them for future cataloging.
Looking at my VMware Events summary, there are quite a few warning and critical events in the last hour. Filtering down to the warning events to do deeper inspection, I can see four of them are warning me of a failed migration for virtual machine DENCLIENTAFF01v
Clicking on one of these events allows me to drill in to get more context. Clearly, I need to look at the configuration of my vMotion interface.
Clicking "Analyze Logs" allows me to have better filtering and is also where I would configure processing rules to start configuring real-time alerting on these VMware events. Yes, event collection is real-time, and as a result, your alerts configured on these events are also triggered in real-time. If you want to be alerted to host connection changes, or when vMotions are triggered when they aren't supposed to be, you now can be alerted immediately.
For those of you who have Log Analyzer, you have even more troubleshooting tools that play very nicely with this VMAN feature. Are you looking to visually see occurrences of this event over time? Easy. Click "Analyze Logs" to navigate to the Log Viewer. Your Log Viewer will differ in that you'll have a visual graph to see how many times this event has occurred over the specified time period. In the example below, I increased the time to two hours, and searched for "vMotion." In addition, I've used the tagging feature to tag all events like this with a "vMotion" tag.
So how do I correlate this to problems? By using PerfStack
dashboard.
After troubleshooting your issues, simply save the PerfStack project and put that project on your NOC view for future visibility.
Deeper Dives and Other Features
For a more in depth look at the VMware events feature check out these documents. Let me know if you have use cases that require real time alerting, monitoring and reporting so we can consider putting them in as OOTB content.
For those of you who are curious what we have for those users who do not need VMware event visibility check out these documents for more details:
- Enhanced UCS hardware health monitoring
- Capacity Planning - Workflow Improvement
- Are you scaling out your Orion
deployment? You need Orion Platform 2018.4 Centralized Upgrades Walkthrough
Next on the VMAN Roadmap
Don't see what you're looking for here? Check out the WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON FOR VIRTUALIZATION MANAGER (UPDATED MARCH, 2019) post for what our dedicated team of virtualization nerds and code jockeys are already looking at. If you don't see everything you've been wishing for there, add it to the Virtualization Manager Feature Requests
This version of VMAN is compatible with the legacy VMAN 8.1 appliance; however, all the newly available features are only on VMAN on the Orion Platform. If you're using the appliance on your production VMAN installation, I recommend that you consider retiring the appliance at your earliest convenience to reap all the benefits of the new features we are developing for VMAN on Orion. If you cannot retire the appliance for any reason, I'm very interested in your feedback and reasons, and would love to see them listed out in the comments below.
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