OS and Application Monitoring

You can monitor application services in VMware Aria Operations. You can use the product-managed agent to monitor physical servers and VMs that are managed or unmanaged by the vCenter Server cloud account (target machine).

For example, as an administrator, you might need to ensure that the infrastructure provided for running the application services is sufficient and that there are no problems. If you receive a complaint that a particular application service is not working properly or is slow, you can troubleshoot by looking at the infrastructure on which the application is deployed. You can view important metrics related to the applications and share the information with the team managing the applications. You can use VMware Aria Operations to deploy the agents and send the related application data to VMware Aria Operations. You can view the data in VMware Aria Operations and share it with the team so that they can troubleshoot the application service.

Using VMware Aria Operations Advanced edition, you can monitor operating systems, conduct remote checks, custom script, and monitor Windows services and Linux processes in VMware Aria Operations. Using VMware Aria Operations Enterprise edition gives you additional capabilities to monitor operating systems and applications, and run custom scripts in VMware Aria Operations. Monitoring AWS and Azure instances through the Telegraf agent is not supported in any of the on-prem license editions.

Note: Remote collectors are not supported by the Application Monitoring management pack.

Product-Managed Telegraf on Different Types of Machines

The following (object types) are now supported for application monitoring based on the type of machine the product-managed Telegraf agent is running on.

• Virtual Machine: Refers to the vCenter Server. All the capabilities of product-managed Telegraf agents and monitoring of the vCenter Server VMs remain the same from previous releases. For more information, see Install and Uninstall a Telegraf Agent and Additional Operations from the Manage Telegraf Agents Page.
• Endpoint: VMware Aria Operations additionally supports the following types of machines that are categorized under an object type called Endpoint:
  • Physical servers
  • Machines that are not directly controlled by VMware Aria Operations. For example, VMs that are not managed by the vCenter Server cloud account.

    To install and uninstall a product-managed Telegraf agent on a remote machine or a physical server, use the helper script. For more information, see Install/Uninstall an Agent Using a Script on a Linux Platform and Install/Uninstall an Agent Using a Script on a Windows Platform. To manage the life cycle of agents on a remote machine or a physical server, use the VMware Aria Operations UI or suite-api. For more information, see Additional Operations from the Manage Telegraf Agents Page.

  In the application monitoring documentation for product-managed Telegraf agents, the term target machine/s refers to physical servers and the VMs that are managed and unmanaged by the vCenter Server cloud account.

High Availability for Application Monitoring

You can now use application monitoring high availability activated collector groups in failover mode to monitor applications without loosing any data (metrics) from the application that is monitored even if your cloud proxy is down or if any of the cloud proxy components fail. Here are some important points:

• Cloud proxies in an application monitoring high availability activated collector group work in a primary-secondary mode.
• You cannot convert an existing Telegraf agent on all target machines, to high availability. To convert an existing target machine to high availability, you must install or re-install the agent with an application monitoring high availability activated collector group.
• You will lose all application data when you add a cloud proxy used by Telegraf agents, to the application monitoring high availability activated collector group.
• Failover or failback has a downtime of three collection cycles.
• Addition or removal of a cloud proxy from the application monitoring high availability activated collector has a downtime of three collection cycles.

Steps to Activate Application Monitoring High Availability on Collector Groups

Here are the steps to activate application monitoring high availability on collector groups and use it for application monitoring and data collection:

1. Activate high availability for specific cloud proxies when you add a collector group. For more information, see Adding a Collector Group.
2. (Optional) You can view the cloud proxies that are configured for high availability from the Cloud Proxies page. For more information, see Monitoring the Health of Cloud Proxies.
3. While installing an agent, select a collector group that has application monitoring high availability activated. For more information, see Install an Agent From the UI.
4. (Optional) You can view the following agent details such as:
   1. If high availability is activated for the collector group (Collector Group column).
   2. The virtual IP configured on an application monitoring high availability activated collector group to which all target machines send data (Virtual IP details column).
   3. The IP address of the primary cloud proxy that is collecting data (Cloud Proxy column).

   You can view these details from the Manage Telegraf Agents page (Environment > Applications > Manage Telegraf Agents). For more information, see Additional Operations from the Manage Telegraf Agents Page.