Tanzu Platform hub components and integrations
Tanzu Platform hub provides a single user interface that integrates existing management solutions to focus on resource management. It also provides business analytics and policies that help you keep your applications and the underlying resources as healthy as possible.
What are accounts
You add connection accounts for your cloud data sources so that Tanzu Platform hub can collect data from those systems. The collected data is stored in the graph database. Tanzu Platform hub can then manage your discovered cloud resources both uniquely within Tanzu Platform hub and by using integrations with your other VMware services.
What is the Entity Data Service
In the context of Tanzu Platform hub, the Entity Data Service (EDS) stores collected data about your resources in a graph database and reconciles the entity IDs for entities collected from both your data sources and from the integrated VMware services.
As inventory data is collected from the integrated VMware services, the entities in EDS are assigned a unique and canonical resource ID. This ID allows EDS and its collectors to normalize the different data models from the different providers, such as native public clouds and VMware services, to merge the separate product namespaces into a common entity in EDS.
The merging ensures that when you are working with resources or applications in Tanzu Platform hub, you are seeing the relevant resource consumption, applications, findings, and business insights provided by the integrated services.
See a VMware blog about the platform architecture for additional information.
What is Tanzu Intelligent Assist
Using natural language questions, you can use the AI-based Intelligent Assist to navigate the Tanzu Platform hub services, query the graph database to work with the data directly in the Intelligent Assist, use it to run entire workflows, and ask questions that are not specific to your connected environments.
| How you can use Tanzu Intelligent Assist | Description |
|---|---|
| Navigating Tanzu Platform hub | Do you need to jump to a particular page in the UI? Ask the Intelligent Assist to take you there. For example, Take to the Kubernetes service map for this cluster. |
| Querying for information and managing your resources | Do you want to find out what is going on in one of your clusters or other resources? Enter a natural language question, for example, Show me critical applications in region us-west-2, and Intelligent Assist constructs a GraphQL query, runs the query on the database, and returns the results in the Intelligent Assist pane. In addition to simple queries, you can go from query results for your resources to seeing the affected applications, and then to Insights for the applications, and on to investigating the Security Posture findings for those same applications, and possibly adding policies. Because Tanzu Platform Hub is an API-first platform, Intelligent Assist performs your commands by turning your requests for change into GraphQL mutations that run the workflows. All without leaving the Intelligent Assist pane or requiring deep GraphQL knowledge. |
| Using the Intelligent Assist for VMware self-service learning | If you ask general questions that are not specific you your environment, ask the question and Intelligent Assist will query various knowledge sources. If your query is VMware-related, for example, What are vSphere datastores or How do I set up a findings source, the results are first based on what the VMware generative AI retrieves and constructs from VMware sources. If the VMware sources can’t answer your question or if the query is not VMware-specific, for example, What is a Kubernetes cluster, the results are based on a generative ChatGPT query. Any limitations are based on what ChatGPT can discover and generate. |
| Understanding how Intelligent Assist handles the data | The Intelligent Assist is an AI system. As such, some answers might be inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent. You should validate important responses. As an AI machine learning system, your feedback helps to train the system. By using thumbs up, thumbs down, and any text input as feedback, you help ensure better responses over time. As an AI system that shares data with 3rd parties for processing, do not share any personal information with the system. |
What are applications
An application is a collection of business-defined resources and services that operates as a business application. It is not the software or code that makes up a software application.
Currently, the applications include only virtual machines. As the platform expands, applications will include, but are not limited to, firewalls, security rules, containers, pods, disks and volumes, network segments, share cloud-native application services such as S3 and RDS, and owned enterprise services such as Active Directory.
Tanzu Platform hub discovers applications using the application discovery service. The service analyzes resource metadata, such as tags and properties, to identify clusters of resources.
You can add or remove resources from discovered applications and respond if Tanzu Platform hub indicates that your attention is needed.
What is VMware Tanzu Insights
To facilitate management and monitoring, Tanzu Platform hub collects alerts, alarms, and events from AWS and Azure, as well as VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as Tanzu Observability by Wavefront) and VMware Aria Operations for Logs. The collected observations are aggregated and correlated into Tanzu Insights that reveal where your attention is needed.
You can then investigate and address the issues as part of your troubleshooting workflow.
What are policies in VMware Tanzu Platform hub
You can define and apply policies in VMware Tanzu Platform hub to ensure that your managed resources comply with defined rules or industry benchmarks. Active policies then report findings for violations, threats, and other changes the might negatively impact your business resources.
Where to begin when using VMware Tanzu Platform hub
Depending on your assigned user role, your workflow might be extensive or focused. The overview in Where to begin when using VMware Tanzu Platform hub provides a general sense of where you can begin as either an organization administrator, a Tanzu Platform hub administrator, or an application owner.
