The virtual infrastructure relies on a monitoring solution able to collect data regarding its health, capacity, availability, and performance. vRealize Operations Manager provides a robust and integrated monitoring platform that sits at the center of the NFV environment. As described in the Operations Workflow section of this document, it serves as the single pane of glass into the NFV environment.
vRealize Operations Manager is installed in the Management pod in both two-pod and three-pod designs. As it collects more data over time, it is possible that additional storage capacity will be required. Adding more hosts to the management cluster, or simply more storage, is sufficient to address the growing storage needs of vRealize Operations Manager.
Since vRealize Operations Manager is the central management component in the vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition platform, its availability to the operator is essential. vRealize Operations Manager supports High Availability (HA). HA creates a primary replica for the vRealize Operations Manager primary node and protects the analytics cluster against the loss of a node. With HA, data stored on the primary node is always completely backed up on the primary replica node. To enable HA, at least one other data node must be deployed in addition to the primary node. Further information is provided in thevRealize Operations Manager vApp Deployment and Configuration Guide.
VMware vRealize Operations Management Packs
VMware vRealize Operations Manager collects structured data from various sources, including gathering data from adapters connected to source servers. For this mechanism to work, vRealize Operations Manager is configured to communicate with source servers using an authorized user account. If the user account has limited access to objects in the source server, it sees only the data for which the account has permissions. At a minimum, the user account must have read privileges across the objects from which it will collect data. A collection of management packs is available on VMware Solution Exchange.
To minimize traffic between the vCenter Server and the vRealize Operations Manager, the vCenter Server Adapter is installed with a five minute collection interval.
VNF vendors can create plug-ins, which are interfaces between vRealize Operations Manager and external components that require management. Plug-in development requires an understanding of the vRealize Operations Manager inventory model, the management functions that plug-ins implement. These include auto-discovery and monitoring. Additional information is available inEndpoint Operations Management Agent Plugin Development Kit.
VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for OpenStack
The VMware vRealize® Operations Management Pack™ for OpenStack allows the operator to quickly view the health of the environment, including services running within the OpenStack infrastructure. The OpenStack management pack integrates with NSX, which allows for easy monitoring and management of the network infrastructure. vRealize Operations management pack for OpenStack includes dashboards to provide visibility into OpenStack deployments, such as:
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OpenStack Management Services
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OpenStack Compute Infrastructure
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OpenStack Network Infrastructure
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OpenStack Tenants
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OpenStack Storage
The below figure provides an example from the OpenStack Tenants dashboard provided by VMware vRealize Operations Manager. On this dashboard, four window panes have been highlighted. In this example, a tenant, named Luling has deployed one network with one Ubuntu instance. In window pane 1, the tenant quota usage pane, three different types of information can be displayed, such as instances used, vCPUs used and vRAM is used. In window pane 2, a list of all of the tenants are displayed. In window pane 3, a list of tenant alerts are provided. In window pane 4, a complete view of the tenant inventory is provided.
VMware vRealize Operations Manager Logging
Audit logs are used to track configuration changes performed by authenticated users to see who initiated a change or scheduled the job that performed a change. All audit logs are forwarded to vRealize Log Insight.
VMware vRealize Operations Manager Alerts
When alerts are generated in vRealize Operations Manager, they appear in the alert details and object details windows. Alerts can be configured to be sent to other applications using one or more outbound alert options.
To configure notification options the operator must specify which alerts are sent out using standard email, REST, SNMP traps, and log file outbound alert plug-ins. The decision to use a specific alerting method is implementation specific and is typically driven by the external monitoring and management tools available.
