Creating custom Applications using vCops

vCops Overview

VMware’s vCenter Operations suite is a comprehensive infrastructure analysis suite that allows all dependencies of your virtualized resources to be analyzed and rolled up into Health badges, while reporting on all vSphere related performance metrics. The key feature that differentiates vCops from standard monitoring tools is its ability to alert based on dynamic thresholds without any additional configuration. These Smart Alerts work by analyzing metrics and determining what is normal usage for a given period of time. This allows vCops to dynamically adjust to your environment and only alert when resources are operating outside of the normal dynamic range of the resource.
For a full description of the vCops suite check out: http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-management/overview.html

While the default dashboard that comes with vCops is useful for identifying and troubleshooting vSphere related resources, as a general rule it is not customizable. To leverage the vCops analyzed data in a more useful way, the vCops Custom UI dashboard can be used. The Custom UI allows for: custom creation of dashboards using widgets, custom metrics using Super Metrics, use of 3rd party monitoring data (ie SCOM) ,and to define corporate application relationships.

vCops Applications Overview 

An application is a type of container resource that defines an interdependent set of hardware and software components that delivers a specific capability that supports your business. You build application topologies to determine how applications are affected when one or more of the resources that they contain experience problems. Applications are created and viewed in the vCops Custom UI only. Resources do not get directly added to Applications. You create Application Tiers in an Application based on groups of application resources and resources get added to these tiers. For example:

 • Application: Mail
Applications should contain all resources that are relevant to the business application you are monitoring. Consequently, if you have configured a vCops 3rd party adapter to pull data from a OS/app monitoring tool like SCOM then make sure to add that resource to the application as well. This will give more insight to overall health and performance of the application. After you configure an application, you can view real-time analysis for any or all of the affected resources in the application, understand where in the application problems arise, and determine how problems spread to other resources. Custom dashboards can be created for applications highlighting the performance, alerts, and overall health of the application. Since vCops already dynamically creates thresholds and alerts for the resources that are added to an Application, no additional steps need to be performed to analyze applications.

How to Create Applications

• From the Custom UI, Environment -> Applications Overview
• Click on the Add New Application icon
• Click on Custom radio button and click Go
• Enter Application Name in Application: field
• Create a Tier by clicking on the Add New Tier icon
• Enter a Tier Name and click Enter
• Click on the Tier name to highlight it
• In the List pane on the bottom right, type the name of the resource into the Search: field and click on the icon
 • Click on the resource in the results to highlight it and then drag it up to the ‘Enter Tier Name’ Resources pane.
• Once you have created Tiers and added resources to them, click on the Save icon to save the Application 

vCops will now track health for the Application and its Tiers.  Furthermore, the Application will now be viewable throughout the Custom UI and can be added to dashboard widgets and reports


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