As a system administrator, you must monitor the capacity for your clusters, hosts, and virtual machines. VMware Aria Operations monitors them at different service levels to ensure that these objects adhere to the policies established for your IT department, and discovers and monitors new objects added to the environment. You have VMware Aria Operations apply policies to the object groups to analyze, monitor, and report on the status of their capacity levels.

To have VMware Aria Operations monitor the capacity levels for your objects to ensure that they adhere to your policies for your service levels, you categorize your objects into Platinum, Gold, and Silver object groups to support the service tiers established.

You create a group type, and create dynamic object groups for each service level. You define membership criteria for each dynamic object group to have VMware Aria Operations keep the membership of objects current. For each dynamic object group, you assign the group type, and add criteria to maintain membership of your objects in the group. To associate a policy with the custom object group, you can select the policy in the group creation wizard.

Prerequisites

  • Know the objects that exist in your environment, and the service levels that they support.
  • Understand the policies required to monitor your objects.
  • Verify that policies are available to monitor the capacity of your objects.

Procedure

  1. To create a group type to identify service level monitoring, from the left menu click Operations > Configurations, and then click the Custom Groups tile. From the Custom Groups page, click Group Types from the top of the page.
  2. On the Group Types toolbar, click Add and type Service Level Capacity for the group type.
    Your group type appears in the list.
  3. From the left menu, click Operations > Configurations, and then click the Custom Groups tile.
  4. To create a new object group, click Add.
    The New Group workspace appears where you define the data and membership criteria for the dynamic group.
    1. In the Name text box, enter a name for the object group, such as Platinum_Objects.
    2. In the Group Type drop-down menu, select Service Level Capacity.
    3. (Optional) In the Policy drop-down menu, select your service level policy that has thresholds set to monitor the capacity of your objects.

      To associate a policy with the custom object group, select the policy in the group creation wizard. To not associate a specific policy with the object group, leave the policy selection blank. The custom object group will be associated with the default policy. If the default policy changes, this object group will be associated with the new default policy.

    4. Select the Keep group membership up to date check box so that VMware Aria Operations can discover objects that meet the criteria, and add those objects to the group.
  5. Define the membership for virtual machines in your new dynamic object group to monitor them as platinum objects.
    1. From the Select Object drop-down menu, select vCenter Adapter, and select Virtual Machine.
    2. From the empty drop-down menu for the criteria, select Metrics.
    3. From the Pick a metric drop-down menu, select Disk Space and double-click Current Size.
    4. From the conditional value drop-down menu, select is less than.
    5. From the Metric value drop-down menu, type 10.
  6. Define the membership for host systems in your new dynamic object group to monitor them as platinum objects.
    1. Click Add another criteria set.
    2. From the Select Object drop-down menu, select vCenter Adapter, and select Host System.
    3. From the empty drop-down menu for the criteria, select Metrics.
    4. From the Pick a metric drop-down menu, select Disk Space and double-click Current Size.
    5. From the conditional value drop-down menu, select is less than.
    6. From the Metric value drop-down menu, type 100.
  7. Define the membership for cluster compute resources in your new dynamic object group.
    1. Click Add another criteria set.
    2. From the Select Object drop-down menu, select vCenter Adapter, and select Cluster Compute Resources.
    3. From the empty drop-down menu for the criteria, select Metrics.
    4. From the Pick a metric drop-down menu, select Disk Space and double-click capacityRemaining.
    5. From the conditional value drop-down menu, select is less than.
    6. From the Metric value drop-down menu, type 1000.
    7. Click Preview to determine whether objects already match this criteria.
  8. Click OK to save your group.
    When you save your new dynamic group, the group appears in the Service Level Capacity folder, and in the list of groups on the Groups tab.
  9. Wait five minutes for VMware Aria Operations to collect data from the objects in your environment.

Results

VMware Aria Operations collects data from the cluster compute resources, host systems, and virtual machines in your environment, according to the metrics that you defined in the group and the thresholds defined in the policy that is applied to the group, and displays the results about your objects in dashboards and views.

What to do next

To monitor the capacity levels for your platinum objects, create a dashboard, and add widgets to the dashboard. See Dashboards in VMware Aria Operations.