Author: Thomas Kopton

SaltStack

Salt Extension Modules for VMware – Quick How-To

My fellow colleague Vincent Riccio described here in his blog post the open-source SaltStack Modules that provide hooks into components such as VMware Cloud on AWS, NSX-T, and vSphere.These modules are a fantastic way to implement prescriptive configuration management across various VMware infrastructure components using the same solution as you should use for software and …

Super Metric, SuperMetric, vRealize Operations, vROps

Exclude “Aggregate” Instanced Metric using vRealize Operations Super Metric

As you know vRealize Operations is collecting tons of various metrics. Some of these metrics are so-called “Instanced Metrics” and disabled in the default configuration in newer vROps versions. A list of disabled instanced metrics for e.g. Virtual Machine object type is available here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Operations/8.6/com.vmware.vcom.metrics.doc/GUID-1322F5A4-DA1D-481F-BBEA-99B228E96AF2.html#disabled-instanced-metrics-18 If you need any of those metrics, you can enable …

JSON, vRealize Log Insight, Webhook

Quick Tip – Programmatically Update vRealize Log Insight Webhook Token

The Webhook feature in vRealize Log Insight is a great way to execute automation tasks, push elements in a RabbitMQ message queue or start any other REST operation. Many endpoints providing such REST methods require a token-based authentication, like the well-known Bearer Token. vRealize Automation is one example of such endpoints. It is pretty easy …

vRealize Log Insight, vRealize Operations, vRLI, vROps

vCenter Events as vRealize Operations Alerts using vRealize Log Insight

As you probably know vRealize Operations provides several symptom definitions based on message events as part of the vCenter Solution content OOTB. You can see some of them in the next picture. These events are used in alert definitions to raise vReaalize Operations alarms any time one of those events is triggered in any of …

vRealize Operations, vROps

vRealize Operations AMQP Integration using Webhooks

With the version 8.4 vRealize Operations introduced the Webhook Outbound Plugin feature. This new Webhook outbound plugin works without any additional software, the Webhook Shim server becomes obsolet. In this post, I will explain how to integrate vRealize Operations with an AMQP system. For this exercise, I have deployed a RabbitMQ server but the concept …

Wavefront

Wavefront by VMware and Log Ingestion

Motivation In my last post, I have described how to ingest power consumption data provided by the vzlogger project into vRealize Log Insight and how to extract the actual metrics from the log message. That setup is working since days as expected but the primary use case for vRealize Log Insight is intelligent logging and …

vRealize Log Insight, vRLI

Energy Consumption Monitoring using SML Data and vRealize Log Insight

It all started with my last electricity bill. Shortly after I have recovered from the shock and made sure that I really do not have any aluminum smelter running in my basement, I decided, I need some kind of monitoring of my electric energy consumption. Insights into data is the first and probably most important step …

vRealize Operations, vROps

Monitoring vSphere HA and Admission Control Settings using vRealize Operations

vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) and Admission Control ensure that sufficient resources are reserved for virtual machine recovery when a host fails. Usually, my customers are running their vSphere clusters in either N+1 or N*2 configurations reflected corresponding Admission Control settings In one of my previous blog posts, I have described how vRealize Operations helps with …

vRealize Operations

Custom Compliance Management using vRealize Operations

As you probably know vRealize Operations provides several Compliance Packs basically out-of-the-box (“natively”). A simple click on “ACTIVATE” in the “Repository” tab installs all needed components of the Compliance Pack and allows the corresponding regulatory benchmarks to be executed. “Regulatory benchmarks provide solutions for industry standard regulatory compliance requirements to enforce and report on the …

vRealize Operations

Capacity Management for n+1 and n*2 Clusters using vRealize Operations

When it comes to capacity management in vSphere environments using vRealize Operations customers are frequently asking for guidelines how to setup vROps to properly manage n+1 and n*2 ESXi clusters. Just as a short reminder, n+1 in context of a ESXi cluster means that we are tolerating (and are hopefully prepared for) the failure of …