Back to troubleshooting with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), this blog will explore the Troubleshooting pillar of vROps beyond the Workbench, specifically Alerts, Logs, and Dashboards. They are rich, focused, and quite helpful when tracking down a problem in your vSphere environment.
In the Troubleshoot column, under Workbench, click the Alerts link and you'll be taken to the Alerts tab (also available at the top).
By default, you'll see all Alerts grouped chronologically. There are four other Group By settings available: None, Criticality, Definition, and Object Type.
You can adjust the visible fields for each Alert by selecting the three columns icon below the list of Alerts and check the boxes you want.
Move the column left or right as you wish, I tend to order them like this.
I like to see the Status, Criticality, and Importance of each alert right away. Note that Importance is different than Criticality, the information bubble describes it like this.
The ACTIONS drop down is used to take action against Alerts or groups of Alerts. Select an Alert, then click ACTIONS.
You will be presented with the available options (Cancel, Delete, Suspend, Assign, etc) as well as options to explore the object on other VMware platforms: vRealize Network Inight (vRNI), the vSphere Web Client, and vRealize Log Insight (vRLI). To use these options you must first have vRNI and vRLI integrated with vROps via Administration - Management - Integrations.
You have similar options when selecting a group of Alerts. Say for example you want to Cancel all Alerts of a certain type, or disable all Alerts of a specific definition, you simply select the group of Alerts then click the ACTIONS dropdown.
Filtering options are available top right via the ALL FILTERS drop down and allow you to search Alerts based on certain criteria.
Under the Configuration twist tab in the left pane you will see the components that comprise a Triggered Alert:
Alert Definitions - Alert name, associated Symptom, Recommendations, Policies, and Notifications.
Symptoms Definitions - there are four types of Symptoms: Metric/Property, Message Event, Fault, and Metric Event. They represent the triggering mechanism for Alerts.
Recommendations - recommendations associated with Alerts, which can also have Actions.
Actions - Actions available with recommendations for the given Alert, these can be taken manually or automated.
Notifications - list of notification rules you can assign to Alerts. Notifications like emails, texts, ServiceNow Incidents, etc.
Next, let's look at the Logs section of the Troubleshooting pillar, which allows you to explore the vRLI Interactive Analytics tab directly from vROps. This requires the vRLI integration via Administration - Management - Integrations.
We'll explore vRLI in detail in our next vRealize blog series.
Finally, the vROps Troubleshooting pillar offers six dashboards from an object perspective.
1. Virtual Machine - provides visibility into the selected VM.
2. Host - shows details for the selected ESXi Host.
3. Cluster - vSphere Cluster details. Note the dashboard navigation available from the Cluster Performance list.
4. Datastore - vSphere Datastore details.
5. vSAN - vSAN Cluster details.
6. Application - this dashboard provides visibility into Applications via the Telgraf Agents (only available in vROps Enterprise). Click the CONFIGURE APPLICATION MONITORING button and follow the instructions to enable.
