IT failures and problems have been big news in recent weeks and while not all is revealed to the public eye as to how or why they occurred, it is safe to say no company wants it to happen to them.
Problems and failures can and will occur and there are many ways to mitigate and protect against it. One of these ways is effective monitoring of your IT Infrastructure. vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) is perfectly suited to being that single source or truth for your entire estate, whether it be Virtual or Physical. vRealize Operations Manager itself is built with resilience in mind, features such as High Availability help protect against an analytics cluster node failure.
Often when I have visited customers a reason they have opted for vROps is to consolidate multiple tools, to try and achieve that holy grail of monitoring which is the single source of truth, something vROps does very well. It offers tremendous extensibility by way of management packs, either provided by VMware, Blue Medora or the vendor of the product you want to monitor.
In addition, in this cloud hungry world, developments from VMware and Blue Medora also allow you to hook into your hybrid cloud estate. So, whether you have applications or workloads in Azure or AWS you centrally monitor and alert effectively.
There are many other reasons I have seen customers choose vROps as their go to monitoring tool.
- Effective and concise alerting – using the ability to filter out all the back-ground noise and understand what is really going on in their estate.
- Customisation – whether it be dashboards or reports, the customers could tailor vROps to suit their specific needs.
- Capacity planning – with the projects feature you can present or change scenarios to vROps and it will give you instant feedback on the impact it would have.
- Scalability – vROps can monitor a vast number of objects.
- Strong user community offering guidance – tips and tricks to get the most from vROps
With the ever-increasing complexity of business IT, effective monitoring of your IT infrastructure is an absolute must. It is often neglected though due to budget constraints or lack of interest, but can very quickly become a priority when a serious issue occurs.
vROps helps forewarn you of a potential issue (disk growth, CPU/RAM/LAN usage) in the form of Risk based alerts. It can also troubleshoot and effectively determine the root cause of current or historical issues. The bottom line is you want to quickly know where the fire is and what caused it.
In an ideal world, you will be able to foresee issues that will arise and avoid them. In part vROps can help you achieve this or at the very least give you a firm handle on what is happening and why so you can address issues, problems and failures quickly and efficiently.
For those of you wanting to learn more about how VMWare solutions can help you automate and better manage IT operations, read our Dummies Guide to Cloud management.
