Top tips for monitoring VMware in System Center

Veeam Management Pack for System Center 2012

Speaker: David Davis Virtualization Expert, Author

Slides: Scott Lowe Founder, managing consultant, The 1610 Group

Q&A: Chris Henley Product strategy specialist, Veeam Software

About today’s webinar

Thought leadership content from an industry expert

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Veeam discussion after David’s content

Who Is David Davis? • Over 18 years of IT experience as

a customer, blogger, and video training author

• vExpert, VCP5, VCAP-DCA, CCIE#9369

• Has written hundreds of articles about virtualization technology

• Spoke at VMworld US & Europe

• Author of the best-selling video training library, available from

Systems Monitoring is Essential

Systems monitoring helps identify issues that negatively

impact the business

Poorly functioning systems directly affect the bottom line

Monitoring can also help the business identify when

infrastructure investments need to be made

Cautions ● Ensure that monitoring systems serve the organization, not the other

way around

● It’s easy to go “monitoring crazy”

Why Choose Operations Manager

Choose a common monitoring framework

Operations Manager 2012 is a powerful, capable

product

Extend Operations Manager through the use of

Management Packs

Operations Manager, when coupled with the Veeam

nworks management pack for System Center 2012, can

provide one-stop shopping for vSphere monitoring

needs

“Single pane of glass”

Through this product combination and with freely

available management packs available from Microsoft,

companies can ● Monitor vSphere

● Monitor System hardware using vendor-specific metrics

● Track network utilization

● Enable best-practices-based service monitoring

Deciding what needs monitoring

At-a-glance active

alerts ● Alerts tell an

administrator that there

is some kind of

exception in the

environment

● By making alerts

quickly accessible, they

can be acted upon

more quickly

Deciding what needs monitoring

Look for ways to

quickly remediate

the problem ● Operations Manager

makes information

sources available to the

administrator

● The Veeam Management

Pack includes

comprehensive

knowledge that guides

administrators toward fast

resolution

Deciding what needs monitoring (examples)

vCenter ● Cluster status

● Host node status

CPU metrics ● CPU ready

● CPU usage per host

● CPU usage in cluster

Disk metrics ● Disk space used

● Datastore allocation

● Read and write latency

● IOPS

Network ● Network traffic

Memory metrics ● Memory pressure (host &

cluster)

● VM balloon memory usage

● Host memory swap rate

● VM memory swap rate

Other key metrics ● Snapshot age

Deciding what needs monitoring

Don’t neglect

the hardware! ● Make sure you

also monitor the

physical hardware

Maximizing your investment

At-a-glance dashboards ● More quickly identify problems that could be negatively affecting

operations (right)

● Quickly pinpoint problem source with hierarchy view (left)

Maximizing your investment

Maintain consistency ● Use a single framework (Operations Manager)

− Extend the framework with freely available management packs

from Microsoft

− Further extend the framework with commercial management packs

from companies such as Veeam

● Administrators will become accustomed to this single framework

● No need to jump between separate management tools

Maximizing your investment

Get both brains and insight ● Monitoring alone is just one part of

the equation

● Reacting to issues in the

environment is critical to

maintaining service health

● Use Product Knowledge to help

identify resolutions to raised issues

● Veeam Management Pack includes

comprehensive guidance for

resolving problems

Maximizing your investment

Choose the right metrics ● Don’t take a scattershot approach

● Intentionally monitor specific metrics critical to your environment

● Avoids losing focus on what’s important

Tailor the monitoring environment through

overrides ● Use Operations Manager overrides to customize the metrics that are

provided in the management pack

● For example, if the management pack default is to alert when datastore

free capacity goes below 10%, you can create an override that

changes this to, say, 15%.

Maximizing your investment

Use historical reporting for key metrics ● Historical reporting can be used to identify trends that might be leading

to issues in the environment or to identify issues that may have been

reported in the past but could not be acted upon immediately

Interactive Demo

Veeam Management Pack

Connecting the Dots

In Depth Knowledge Base

Sharepoint Integration

Rich Reporting and Analysis

BONUS PRIZE

Scott Lowe’s System Center Video Training

Yes, he does show how to use the Veeam nworks mgmt pack!

Q&A - ONE BIG QUESTION: Win a book!

What does RPO stand for? __________________ (Answer in GoToWebinar)

THANK YOU!

Speaker: David Davis

Slides: Scott Lowe

Q&A: Chris Henley