Objects are the structural components of your mission-critical IT applications: virtual machines, datastores, virtual switches and port groups are examples of objects.
Because downtime equals cost - in unused resources and lost business opportunities - it's crucial that you successfully identify, monitor and track objects in your environment. The goal is to proactively isolate, troubleshoot and correct problems even before users are aware that anything is wrong.
When a user actually reports an issue, the solution should be quick and comprehensive.
For a complete list of objects that can be defined in VMware Aria Operations refer to Object Discovery.
VMware Aria Operations gives you visibility into objects including applications, storage and networks across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures through a single interface that relates performance information to positive or negative events in the environment.
Managing Objects
When you monitor a large infrastructure, the number of objects and corresponding metrics in VMware Aria Operations grows rapidly, especially as you add solutions that extend dynamic monitoring and alerts to more parts of your infrastructure. VMware Aria Operations gives you ample tools to stay abreast of events and issues.
Adding Objects and Configuring Object Relationships
VMware Aria Operations automatically discovers objects and their relationships once you create an adapter instance. You have the added ability to manually add any objects that you want monitored and to configure object relationships using abstract concepts rather than the connections recorded by VMware Aria Operations. Where VMware Aria Operations might discover the classic parent-child relationships between objects, you can create relationships between objects that might not normally be related. For example, you could configure all the datastores supporting a company department to be related.
When objects are related, a problem with one object appears as an anomaly on related objects. So object relationships can help you to identify problems in your environment quickly. The object relationships that you create are called custom groups.
Custom Groups
To create an automated management system you need some way to organize objects so that you can quickly gain insights. You can achieve a high level of automation using custom groups. You have multiple options for tailoring group attributes to support your monitoring strategy.
For example, you can designate a group either to be static or to be updated automatically with membership criteria that you designate. Consider a non-static group of all virtual machines that are powered on and have OS type Linux. When you power on a new Linux VM, it is automatically added to the group and the policy is applied.
For additional flexibility, you can also specify individual objects to be always included or excluded from a given custom group. Or you can have a different set of alerts and capacity calculations for your production environment versus your testing environments.
Managing Applications
VMware Aria Operations allows you to create containers or objects that can contain a group of virtual machines or other objects in different structural tiers. This new application can then be managed as a single object, and have health badges and alarms aggregated from the child objects of the group.
For example, the system administrator of an online training system might request that you monitor components in the Web, application and database tiers of the training environment. You build an application that groups related training objects together in each tier. If a problem occurs with one of the objects, it is highlighted in the application display and you can investigate the source of the problem
The Power of Object Management
Using the power of object management, including metrics and alerts - some prepackaged into dashboards and policies, others that you combine into custom monitoring tools - you'll keep a close watch on the objects, applications and systems that must stay up and running.
