#vrops

A quick post of how to setup management pack for Orchestrator in Operations. Prerequistes Make sure you have Advanced or Enterprise license applied in vROps. Standard will not allow you to add vRO integration. Enable Basic Authentication in Orchestrator using SSH. This will restart the services in Orchestrator. Steps here vracli vro properties set -k…

In the world of IT operations, the ability to monitor and manage infrastructure resources efficiently is critical. With vRealize Operations (vROps), IT teams can use various methods to organize resources, such as Tags, Application Groups, and Custom Groups. Each of these grouping methods offers unique features and benefits, making them ideal for different scenarios. In this article, we will…

In today’s fast-paced digital world, automation is key to improving productivity and efficiency. One area where automation can be particularly useful is in managing resources in vRealize Operations (vROps), VMware’s comprehensive operations management platform. With its powerful API and extensive Python libraries, it’s possible to create Python scripts to interact with vROps, automate tasks, and…

vROPS 8.x: Configuring vSphere Solution and Cloud Accounts

In this post we will see, what is cloud account in vROPS and how to setup cloud account for vSphere solution.

The vSphere solution allows vROPS to connect to one or more vCenter Server instances. This is pretty much the starting point when configuring vROPS installation to collect data. Once connected to vCenter Server instance, vROPS collects data and metrics from those instances with…

vRealize Operations Manager 8.0 & 8.1 Requirements, Sizer, and maximums

In this post, we will discuss about requirements for vROPS 8.0 and 8.1 requirements, vROPS Sizer tool and sizing guidelines for vRealize Operations Manager to determine the configurations used during installation and post install.

vROPS Sizer

VMware provides vROPS sizer tool to help you with sizing vROPS deployments. Recommended sizing for vRealize Operations Manager 6.5 and later can be…

Integration : Enterprise PKS with vRealize Operations Manager

VMware vRealize Operations Manager delivers intelligent operations management with application-to-storage visibility across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. Using data collected from system resources, vRealize Operations Manager identifies issues in any monitored system component, often before the customer notices a problem. vRealize Operations Manager also frequently suggests…

By Simon Eady

Big IT failures and problems always seem to make the news and it often takes a big ‘real world’ problem for people to realise the importance that IT has within almost every sector.

And while not all is revealed to the public eye as to how or why such IT failures occur – nor may they really care as long as their service continues to work – it is safe to say that no company wants to be the one that incurs an IT failure or problem, as this can directly affect the way they’re perceived by staff, existing and prospective customers.

So, the question is, how can they mitigate and protect against it from happening?

Well, this isn’t just about having the right IT infrastructure in place – although of course that helps - but it is about monitoring that IT infrastructure. Often, businesses may neglect monitoring their infrastructure due to budget constraints or lack of interest, but it can very quickly become a priority when a serious issue occurs.

Without careful monitoring of IT infrastructure, downtime and critical issues can become increasingly more likely causing serious impact to the business. Being pro-active and making sure you have a monitoring system in place can help you be better prepared and maximise the efficiency of your IT infrastructure.

Key reasons for monitoring

There are a number of benefits for organisations from monitoring IT infrastructure beyond just detecting issues.

Troubleshooting

By monitoring IT infrastructure, potential issues can be identified and detected before they become critical and result in downtime. A good monitoring system can enable you to detect and resolve issues before any users get affected.

Reporting

A monitoring system gives you complete visibility of your IT infrastructure so can help provide useful metrics and analytics. Regular reporting can help you gain insights into a number of areas such as identifying trends, usage levels, network/system availability.

Efficiency

With issue detection and troubleshooting taking less time with a monitoring system, IT resources can be freed up to focus on core infrastructure and IT services and service delivery.

 vROps as a monitoring tool

When it comes to monitoring there are a number of tools and solutions available, in my experience working in this area, I’m finding that many organisations are opting for VMware vRealize® Operations™ Manager (vROps) as their preferred monitoring tool for the entire estate, whether it be Virtual or Physical.

vROps is VMware’s operations management and monitoring product that enables organisations to consolidate multiple tools as they strive to achieve that holy grail of getting a single source of truth that covers the whole estate.

Built with resilience in mind, coming with built-in features such as High Availability to help protect against an analytics cluster node failure, vROps also offers tremendous extensibility by way of management packs via VMware, Blue Medora vROps integration, or the vendor of the product that you want to monitor.

What’s more, VMware (and Blue Medora integration packs) also allow users to hook in their hybrid cloud estate, so whether you have applications or workloads in Azure or AWS, you can centrally monitor and alert effectively.

vROps provides a whole host of benefits to organisations as a comprehensive solution for IT infrastructure monitoring, including:

Automation – vROps can not only alert but also remediate, either manually via prompts or automatically, both using hook ins to vCenter and vRO

Customisation – whether it be dashboards or reports, customers can tailor vROps to suit their specific needs

Capacity planning – with the projects feature you can present or change scenarios to vROps and it will give you instant feedback on the impact it would have risk-based alerts - vROps can forewarn people of a potential issue with regards to disk growth, or usage of CPU/RAM/LAN

Effective and concise alerting – using the ability to filter out all the background noise and understand what is really going on in the estate

Scalability – vROps can monitor a vast number of objects

Workload placement – ensuring your workloads are accurately and effectively placed maximising your ROI on your hardware and ensuring your end users are getting the resources they need.

In addition to all the business benefits, vROps also has a strong user community that can offer tips, tricks and guidance to get the most out of vROps.

 Final thoughts

The bottom line is, businesses want to quickly know where there is an issue and what caused it, but perhaps more importantly, where an issue may be initiating so that it can be stopped before it becomes serious. Monitoring IT infrastructure and vROps can help businesses achieve this, or at the very least give a firm handle on what is happening and why, so issues, problems and failures can be addressed quickly and efficiently.

If you want to know more about how you can maximise the efficiency of your IT infrastructure and monitoring solutions, then Xtravirt can help. We provide advisory, design and implementation services to create the right solution for your organisation. Contact us and we’d be happy to use our wealth of knowledge and experience to assist you.  

About the Author

Simon Eady joined the Xtravirt consulting team in October 2014. He has wide ranging IT experience including Virtual Infrastructure design and implementation, while currently specialising in vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation. He was awarded VMware vExpert 2018, is a leader of the South West UK VMUG Group and is a graduate of the VMware Advanced Architecture Course 2018.

About Xtravirt

Xtravirt are an experienced consulting firm dedicated to delivering outcomes to help customers solve their IT challenges. We design and build strategies to help customers unlock the full potential of cloud, datacentre and workspace technology.

We are the VMware Global and EMEA Professional Services partner of the year.