The multilayer, multi-vendor nature of the NFV environment can lead to increase operational management complexity. To resolve this complexity, vCloud NFV is integrated with a robust operational management system that monitors and analyzes components involved in the NFV environment. When the physical servers and switches include monitoring adaptors for the VMware operational management components, the entire system, including the virtualization layer and the VNF themselves, can be automatically discovered, monitored, and analyzed.
Designing the monitoring system to provide visibility into the entire environment requires the ability to integrate data collection from VMware software components alongside third-party elements such as VNFs, routers, switches, servers, and storage elements. This complete visibility is achieved using a suite of software components described in the Operations Management Components section of this document.
The data collected is continuously analyzed, which allows for near real-time monitoring. This results in robust performance monitoring that enables the operator to perform detailed capacity management. Since the monitoring system is tightly integrated with the VIM, virtualization, and physical layers, proactive failure avoidance is implemented by leveraging vRealize Operations Manager analytics and DRS. In cases where a problem does occur root cause analysis can easily be performed, since the operator has holistic visibility into the entire system.
