Healthwatch for VMware Tanzu

This topic provides an overview of Healthwatch™ for VMware Tanzu^® (Healthwatch) features and functionality.

For information about new features and breaking changes, see Healthwatch Release Notes.

Overview of Healthwatch

Healthwatch allows you to monitor metrics related to the functionality of your Ops Manager platform.

A complete Healthwatch installation includes the Healthwatch tile, as well as at least one Healthwatch Exporter tile. There are Healthwatch Exporter tiles for both the VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs (TAS for VMs) and VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition (TKGI) runtimes.

You must install a Healthwatch Exporter tile on each Ops Manager foundation you want to monitor. You can install the Healthwatch tile on the same foundation or on a different foundation, depending on your desired monitoring configuration.

You can also configure the Healthwatch Exporter tiles to expose metrics to a service or database located outside your Ops Manager foundation, such as an external time-series database (TSDB) or an installation of the Healthwatch tile on a separate Ops Manager foundation. This does not require you to install the Healthwatch tile on the same Ops Manager foundation as the Healthwatch Exporter tiles.

For a detailed explanation of the Healthwatch architecture, a list of open ports required for each component, and possible configurations for monitoring metrics with Ops Manager or an external service or database, see Reference Architecture.

For more information about each of these tiles, see the following sections below:

• Overview of the Healthwatch Tile

• Overview of the Healthwatch Exporter for TAS for VMs Tile

• Overview of the Healthwatch Exporter for TKGI Tile

For more information on the limitations and risks of using Healthwatch, see the following sections below:

• Healthwatch Limitations

• Assumed Risks of Using Healthwatch v2.2

Overview of the Healthwatch Tile

The Healthwatch tile monitors metrics from one or more Ops Manager foundations by scraping them from Healthwatch Exporter tiles installed on each foundation.

Healthwatch deploys instances of Prometheus and Grafana. The Prometheus instance scrapes and stores metrics from the Healthwatch Exporter tiles and allows you to configure alerts with Alertmanager.

Healthwatch then exports the collected metrics to dashboards in the Grafana UI, allowing you to visualize the data with charts and graphs and create customized dashboards for long-term monitoring and troubleshooting.

Healthwatch includes the following features:

• Prometheus:

  • Scrapes /metrics endpoints for Healthwatch Exporter tiles, collecting metrics related to the functionality of platform- and runtime-level components that include the following:
    • Service level indicators (SLIs) for the BOSH Director
    • SLIs for TAS for VMs components
    • SLIs for TKGI components
    • When Ops Manager certificates are due to expire
    • Canary URL tests for TAS for VMs apps
    • Counter, gauge, and container metrics for TAS for VMs from the Loggregator Firehose
    • Super value metrics (SVMs)
    • BOSH system metrics for TKGI
    • VMs deployed by Healthwatch Exporter tiles
  • Stores metrics for up to six weeks
  • Can write to remote storage in addition to its local TSDB

• Grafana: Allows you to visualize the collected metrics data in charts and graphs, as well as create customized dashboards for easier monitoring and troubleshooting

• Alertmanager: Manages and sends alerts according to the alerting rules you configure

Overview of the Healthwatch Exporter for TAS for VMs Tile

The Healthwatch Exporter for TAS for VMs tile deploys metric exporter VMs to generate each type of metric related to the health of your TAS for VMs deployment.

Healthwatch Exporter for TAS for VMs sends metrics through the Loggregator Firehose to a Prometheus exposition endpoint on the associated metric exporter VMs. The Prometheus instance that exists within your metrics monitoring system then scrapes the exposition endpoints on the metric exporter VMs and imports those metrics into your monitoring system.

Healthwatch Exporter for TAS for VMs exposes the following metrics related to the functionality of TAS for VMs components, TAS for VMs apps, and the Healthwatch Exporter for TAS for VMs tile:

• SLIs for TAS for VMs components

• Canary URL tests for TAS for VMs apps

• Counter, gauge, and container metrics for TAS for VMs from the Loggregator Firehose

• SVMs

• VMs deployed by Healthwatch Exporter for TAS for VM

Overview of the Healthwatch Exporter for TKGI Tile

The Healthwatch Exporter for TKGI tile deploys metric exporter VMs to generate SLIs related to the health of your TKGI deployment.

The Prometheus instance that exists within your metrics monitoring system then scrapes the Prometheus exposition endpoints on the metric exporter VMs and imports those metrics into your monitoring system.

Healthwatch Exporter for TKGI exposes the following metrics related to the functionality of TKGI components and the Healthwatch Exporter for TKGI tile:

• SLIs for TKGI components

• BOSH system metrics for TKGI

• VMs deployed by Healthwatch Exporter for TKGI

Product Snapshot

The following table provides version and version support information about Healthwatch:

Element	Details
Version	v2.2.9
Release date	October 12, 2023
Compatible Ops Manager versions	v2.10, v3.0
Compatible TAS for VMs versions	v2.11, v2.13, v3.0, v4.0, v5.0
Compatible TKGI versions	v1.15, v1.16
IaaS support	AWS, Azure, GCP, OpenStack, and vSphere

Healthwatch v2.2 Limitations

Healthwatch v2.2 has the following limitations:

• Healthwatch v2.2 does not configure external data stores.

• Healthwatch v2.2 does not provide an SMTP server. You must use an external SMTP server when you configure alerts from Alertmanager or the Grafana UI.

• Healthwatch v2.2 does not expose the UI for the open-source components Alertmanager and Prometheus because the UIs are not secure. However, you can access the UIs of the Prometheus and Alertmanager VMs for troubleshooting. For more information, see Accessing VM UIs for Troubleshooting in Troubleshooting Healthwatch.

• Healthwatch v2.2 only supports configuring alert receivers for email, PagerDuty, Slack, and webhooks for alerts. For more information, see Configure Alert Receivers in Configuring Alerting.

• Healthwatch v2.2 does not include a federated dashboard or an overview dashboard for monitoring multiple Ops Manager foundations with the same runtime installed. You can create custom dashboards to monitor multiple Ops Manager foundations.

• Healthwatch v2.2 is not meant to be a long-term data store. It only stores data for six weeks.

• Healthwatch v2.2 is not designed to capture all metrics from multiple Ops Manager foundations. For more information about the metrics that Healthwatch v2.2 stores, see Healthwatch Metrics.

• Healthwatch v2.2 is designed for platform operators. The best monitoring option for app developers is Tanzu Observability by Wavefront. For more information about Tanzu Observability by Wavefront, see the Tanzu Observability by Wavefront documentation.

• Healthwatch v2.2 does not create graphs and alerts for all metrics emitted from the platform. Instead, the default graphs and alerts curate metrics based on the overall health of the platform and its components.

• Healthwatch v2.2 does not support Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) outside of TKGI.

Assumed Risks of Using Healthwatch v2.2

The following list describes the problems that could arise when using Healthwatch v2.2:

• Healthwatch v2.2 uses open-source components, including Grafana, Prometheus, and Alertmanager. VMware does not have direct control over how quickly feature changes and bug fixes appear in these components.

• If your Ops Manager foundation is customized for your organization, the default Healthwatch v2.2 dashboards in the Grafana UI may not be relevant to your deployment. However, you can create custom dashboards in the Grafana UI and adjust the default thresholds.

• If you create a custom dashboard in the Grafana UI, it does not update when you upgrade to the next Healthwatch release. Similarly, if you edit the default dashboards that Healthwatch v2.2 generates, the dashboards revert to their default settings when you upgrade to the next Healthwatch release.

• If an email address to which you have configured Alertmanager to send email alerts is deactivated, the email alerts may bounce. This could cause your email server to block the SMTP server and prevent any other configured email addresses from receiving email alerts.

• If any Healthwatch components go down during installation or an upgrade, you may see no metrics for the period of time in which you installed or upgraded Healthwatch.