Metrics can strengthen any environment, whether large and in need of strict monitoring and alerting, or compact and looking to track every data point of pay-go utilization. VMware offers a solution for either, in a fully-featured VCF cluster with Aria Operations or in a virtual datacenter environment through Chargeback. In this blog we will briefly showcase using Aria Operations (formerly vRealize) with VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud.
Assumptions
- You have an IBM Cloud account (Don't have an IBM Cloud account yet? Sign up here.)
- You have a VCF Cluster on Classic already configured
Provisioning Aria
First, go to the services tab for your VCF on Classic cluster. You can see what services you’ve already procured for your cluster here. If you don’t see Aria Operations, click “Add” in the top right.
Here there are a variety of services available to you for your cluster, from migration services, to gateway appliances, and our OpenShift offering on VMware. At the very bottom you should see Aria Operations listed.
NOTE: With VCF, the licensing for this service is integrated into the product. See here for a full list of included services with the VMware Cloud Foundation bundle.
Upon activating Aria, you should see it begin to provision the ~10 systems used for the analytics cluster, tracked under your “Services” tab. This can take some time (in our testing, around an hour).
Once complete, click the VMware Aria Operations and VMware Aria Operations for Logs Enterprise Edition service to open your credentials panel.
From here you should see a few private IP addresses with associated FQDNs, user names, and passwords. These comprise a multi-node analytics cluster that is deployed within your VMware management environment. As you’d expect, each of these serves a different purpose:
- Aria Operations Manager gathers metrics and analyzes the operation of objects within the VMware architecture.
- Aria Operations for Logs provides real-time log management and analysis with machine-learning based grouping and high performance querying using syslog
- Aria Operations for Networks measures network health and performance monitoring
For our purposes, let’s check on some metrics of our virtual machines by logging into the Aria Operations Manager UI, using the generated FQDN, username, and password.
Logging In
Upon first accessing the management console you should see a “Congratulations page”. Review and complete the form, making sure to select Product Evaluation (no key required for section 3 - licensing has already been procured with VCF.
Once the form is completed, you should be able to see a variety of options on the left.
Data Sources provides integrations and service discovery for metrics. Keep in mind, your VMs should already have begun to be measured here. Environment is the collection of objects in the VMware environment that Aria Operations keeps track of. These can be centralized, such as virtual machines, hosts, datacenters, and vSAN, or load balancers and edge nodes. Visualize is a dashboard and report manager Troubleshoot handles alerts and log analysis / query tooling Optimize and Plan assist in (restructuring) an environment Configure allows you to set various profiles, alerts, prioritize metrics, and create widgets and profiles. Automation Central is a calendar-based job-scheduling tool Administration provides a broad scope of management tiles Developer Center is for all things around using and integrating Aria Operations APIs
Tracking Utilization
In our test cluster, we’ve created a very small VM and filled it incrementally with fallocate.
We can see the virtual machine’s usage directly from Aria Operations Environment pane: All Objects -> vCenter -> Virtual Machine
Additionally, we can get full-cluster metrics directly for a high-level view:
NOTE: Aria Operations isn’t limited to its VMware cluster - using an Aria-managed agent, you are able to target physical servers and VMs that aren’t managed by vCenter.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief glimpse into VMware Aria Operations on IBM Cloud. There are many different integrations and products available for VMware! In a future blog, we’ll show how Aria can integrate with cloud-managed databases as a robust, API-driven monitoring solution.
If you have any questions around this content, please reach out to john.bernhardt@ibm.com