How to access advanced monitoring using the vRealize Operations Tenant Appliance

Overview

UKCloud for VMware provides advanced monitoring, powered by the vRealize Operations (vROps) Tenant Appliance, as part of its Advanced Management bundle (additional charges apply). Using advanced monitoring, you can view metrics and reports relating to your UKCloud for VMware environment.

Advanced monitoring enables you to:

  • Monitor and manage workloads - Over 400 different metrics available for CPU, memory and storage

  • Identify workload optimisation options - Use analytics displaying the overall health of the platform to optimise your workloads

  • Rightsize your VMs - Identify if your VMs can be resized to reduce costs or improve performance

  • View optimisation history - Identify issues over a given time frame and make adjustments as necessary

Intended audience

To access advanced monitoring you must be a VMware Cloud Director administrator.

Accessing advanced monitoring metrics

To access advanced monitoring metrics:

  1. In VMware Cloud Director, in the top menu, select More, then Operations Manager.

    Operations Manager menu option in VMware Cloud Director

  2. In the left navigation panel, under Dashboards, select Organization Overview

    Organization Overview menu option

  3. In the Organization Overview dashboard you can view basic metrics and reporting for your organisation, including CPU, memory and storage.

    Basic metrics in the Organization Overview dashboard

    The overview dashboard also provides:

    • A summary of VDC, vApp and VM metrics

    • A list of recent alerts that have been generated

    • A set of key metrics

    vApp and VDC summary information in the Organization Overview dashboard

    You can drill down into any of these for further details.

  4. In the left navigation panel, select a different dashboard to drill down into metrics for:

    • Organization VDCs

    • vApps

    • Virtual Machines

    Click a VDC, vApp or VM to view metrics for a specific resource.

Creating custom reports using the Metric Selector

The vRealize Operations Tenant Appliance provides several out-of-the-box charts to get you started and provide the basic information you need to monitor your environment. However, to fully leverage the hundreds of metrics collected by vRealize Operations, you can create your own custom charts to view the exact information you need.

To create custom reports:

  1. In the left navigation panel of the Operations Manager, under Dashboards, select Metric Selector.

    Metric Selector menu option in the Operations Manager

  2. At the top of the Metric Selector, choose the resources to include in your custom chart.

    Select resources in the Metric Selector

  3. In the bottom half of the Metric Selector, in the left panel, select the metrics that you want to show for your selected resources.

  4. Above the chart, select a Start Date and End Date to apply to your selected metrics.

    Select metrics and date range in the Metric Selector

  5. To export your custom chart, click the Export button.

    Export button in the Metric Selector

Viewing monitoring alerts

If objects in your environment are not behaving as expected, vRealize Operations creates alerts to inform you of potential issues so that you can take steps to remediate them.

To view monitoring alerts:

  1. In the left navigation panel of the Operations Manager, under Monitoring, select Alerts.

    Alerts menu option

  2. The Alerts dashboard provides an overview of the alerts raised against your organisation.

    Alerts dashboard

    You can drill down into any of these alerts for further details.

Accessing advanced monitoring metrics via the vRealize Operations API

vRealize Operations provides a REST API that you can use to programmatically interact with the collected metrics. The entry point URL for the API is:

https://<vrops-ip>/suite-api/api

For more information about the vRealize Operations API, see the vRealize Operations Manager API Programming Guide.

For a useful blog showing how to use the vRealize Operations API, see https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2019/02/extracting-data-from-vrealize-operations-with-the-rest-apis.html.

Next steps

If you encounter any problems accessing monitoring metrics and reports, see Troubleshooting the vRealize Operations Tenant Appliance for advanced monitoring.

Feedback

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