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 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. For more information see vRealize Operations Manager vApp Deployment and Configuration Guide.
VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack
VMware vRealize Operations Manager collects structure 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 the traffic between 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. More information is available at Endpoint Operations Management Agent Plugin Development Kit.
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 a job that performed the 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 also 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 with the 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.
