LegendDid anybody else notice the ~44 new and ~5 updated modules around VMware dropping in the last hour or so? Does anyone know how to implement these new modules? Since there was talk of making the instances into resources I don’t want to just bring them in without knowing how it’s going to mess with my device list (which is tightly bound to billing for us).
Product ManagerThat would be interesting… one of our pain points at the moment is putting vSphere hosts into SDT. We don’t actually monitor the hosts as such at the moment, just through the vCenter, so the vCenter is the only resource. As I understand it, if our operations team wants to SDT a host, we’d have to do it under each datasource it appears in under it’s parent vCenter.
If hosts and datastores etc show up a devices that can be separately SDT’d then that’d be great.
Likewise, we’re setting up a separate LM instance to do stuff like this in!
Dave
To accomplish this with the new modules and onboarding process, you can have the Enhanced Script NetScan add your desired vSphere Clusters (ESXi hosts) as Resources and disable the following DataSources:
VMware_vCenter_HostPerformance
VMware_vCenter_HostVSwitch
VMware_vCenter_HostInterfaces
After doing this, you can selectively SDT by DataCenter, Cluster, Resource Pool, or individual ESXi host.
Product ManagerBelow are some highlights about the new VMware vSphere modules.
Product ManagerDid anybody else notice the ~44 new and ~5 updated modules around VMware dropping in the last hour or so? Does anyone know how to implement these new modules? Since there was talk of making the instances into resources I don’t want to just bring them in without knowing how it’s going to mess with my device list (which is tightly bound to billing for us).
Hi,
Product ManagerWe’re part the way through onboarding a load of internal and customer VMware platform platforms into LM, so interested in this as well.
I’d be interested to understand the reason for releasing new modules over updating the existing? The commit history for the brand new ones mentioned ‘optimized for vSphere 8’ but the AppliesTo doesn’t seem to limit them to vSphere 8 vCenters/hosts, so loathed to import them just yet as I expect we’ll have a lot of duplication in data collection and alerts if we did.
Dave
Hi,
To maintain historical data, make sure to disable previous datasources rather than changing the AppliesTo or deleting them.
Product ManagerAt the bottom of the product docs:
Each customers’ change control process is likely to be unique, but you may find value in this high-level (generalized) diagram.
If there are specific questions or scenarios you’d like us to add to the product documentation, please let me know and we’ll be happy to consider adding them.
Thanks
LegendI think that’s generally the advantage they’re trying to provide. Make things that should be resources into resources (not instances). The same is reportedly going to happen for Meraki (and maybe other controller based tech).
Product ManagerHi,
@Stuart Weenig . Migrating to the new modules will not convert instances into Resources. However, the Enhanced Script NetScan filters make it easy to add the ESXi hosts and Mission Critical VMs you want to monitor as Resources. You can setup filters that mirror your business logic and schedule the NetScan to query vCenter on (as frequent as) an hourly basis to add the exact resources you want, so what you deem to need monitoring gets monitored automatically.
So all the netscan really does is add the resources I already have in LM and create some group structure? Pretty sure we’re not going to use it then since adding devices in is associated with billing and we don’t just add stuff in because it exists. Is there a propertysource we can use to grab the additional properties the nestcan would set without all the stuff we don’t need?
Is there any benefit to importing the datasources if I’m not using the netscan?
That’s a huge netscan script and a lot of warnings about changing it. If you’re so worried about people changing it, why not make it a snippet and then the netscan script is 3-4 lines (import the snippet, run the snippet, output the data)?
Certainly, you do not have to use the NetScan. However, if you have some logic in vCenters that determine what should be monitored as a resource, i.e. tags, naming conventions…. the NetScan can use those to automatically add resources as they are created (in less than an hour if you set the NetScan to recurring) so you don’t have to have a manual process to do this. Some customers prohibit use of ICMP NetScans in their Data Centers, so they use a manual process to export information from vCenter, put it in a properly formatted CSV file, then import it into LM. Because this NetScan communicates with vCenter rather than scanning the network, it can automate this process. The organization part of the NetScan makes it easy for VMware admins to find resources, because it puts them in LM in a structure that mirrors what’s in vCenter. So, the VMware admin gets a folder structure that is intuitive to them, and the business can use Dynamic Resource Groups to place resources in LM where it makes sense to the business. For existing customers like yourselves, you’d have to decide if you want to use this method or not. It’s not required.
If the existing modules are working for you without issue and you don’t see an immediate need for any of the new features (shown in the screenshots above), then you can plan to migrate when it makes sense to you. However, if at some point you encounter an issue with a future vSphere 8.x compatibility issue or some other issue with the deprecated modules, your recourse would be to adopt the new/replacement module(s). The new modules are the only ones “supported” for vSphere 8.x.
As for the NetScan, we’re looking at ways to reduce the total steps required and to mitigate user error, but I don’t expect those to come in 2023. For now, it achieved our goals of organizing resources in an manner that’s intuitive for VMware Admins, automating vSphere device discover and onboarding, and reducing the typical time to onboard new hosts and VMs that customers want to monitor as Resources from as much as a week to an hour or less.
ProfessorHere are some more details. We ended up having to build a dynamic group to turn off the “VMware ESXi *” set of dataSources. Unsure if the issue is a single DS or all hitting at the same time. we have 64 VMware hosts and 3 device PureStorage SAN under them. The utilization for the SAN devices tripled when these got turned on. I have a ticket in with LM to explore this issue with these. Went through the batchscripts with our virt team and nothing seemed out of place individually in terms of API/SDK calls being made. DS were installed at 2:12PM per the LM audit logs, performance started rising nearly immediately. My suspicion is that the wait queue for disk access started going up due to the volume of requests (10 DS x 64 hosts = 640 requests)
LegendAny chance that distinction could be made? New modules are fine, but for existing modules, I have to check for customizations and custom thresholds applied at group levels. Knowing which ones are new and which ones are updates (which contradicts the you-can-safely-import-these-because-they-have-different-names message) will cut down on the amount of work I have to do to vet these modules.
