RE: EM 12c VMware Plugin/monitoring
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2013 18:12:15 +0000
Message-ID: <92C2516C1D75EB4A922A8EE402EC23D555467816_at_helo.usa.burton.com>
oracledbaquestions_at_gmail.com wrote:
> Not sure if its worth looking at the VMware plugin for EM? anyone use it?
> At first glance it just looks like its Vsphere plugged into EM with a few prettier
> pictures. That isn't useful to me. This would only be useful if I could get the data
> added to my dashboard so I can go to my hosts screen and keep an eye on all of
> them from one screen and set up email alerts., etc...
> The Admin work here is not real heavy lifting, but it can be tedious. This is a
> smaller team so there is only 1 SA and he is spread over 2 projects.
>
> any other options than this for monitoring the actually VMWare hosts from with
> in EM 12c? Think with the new dashboard configuration, I can organize my VMs
> in the dashboard and group them by host manually, but I don't know if there is a
> way to get host level metrics off of EM ( can I install an oracle agent on a
> Vmware OS on the host? )
I have the Blue Medora VMWare plugin for EM12c installed, though I only have one Oracle database sitting on a VM so my use case is very different from yours.
You can definitely install the EM12c agent within a guest OS running in VMware. When you do this, that VM will appear on your Targets->Hosts screen along with your physical hosts, but as far as OEM is concerned that is just another host, and it will not have any VMWare-specific knowledge of that host. That may be enough for your needs, and it will give you all the host level metrics you would expect like RAM and CPU usage, free disk space, etc -- from the perspective of the guest OS. Or maybe you were asking if you can install the agent on the hypervisor OS -- if that's the question, I have no idea.
When you have the plugin installed you can promote VMWare virtual machines as targets. These use a completely different target type than do hosts, so they will NOT appear on your Targets->Hosts screen along with your other hosts. But these targets are VMWare-aware in the sense that when you view a VM managed by this plugin, that VMs home screen includes various other information like the name and current performance of the hypervisor where it is running, the VM cluster and datacenter it uses, vSphere events and alarms relevant to it, ballooned memory, memory and CPU reservations, consumed hypervisor CPU, etc. The plugin also provides its own dedicated dashboards for the VMWare target types that it monitors: the entire vSphere environment, datacenters, clusters, hypervisors, datastores, VMs, and also has dashboards for non-targets like the events and alarms that one sees when logged in to vSphere.
The VMWare plugin does monitor metrics and store those metrics in the EM12c repository. As with other metrics monitored by EM12c, you can view current values and historical charts. Many, but not all, of these metrics allow you to set warning and critical thresholds, which when triggered produce events and incidents as with all other metrics monitored by EM12c. From there you can write incident rules to handle those events however you see fit, including email notifications, paging, all run through the native EM12c functionality. Some of the various metrics for which you can set thresholds include: CPU/Disk/RAM utilization % at the level of the full vSphere environment, individual clusters or datacenters, individual hypervisors or VMs; also for hypervisors down, VMs powered on/off/suspended, active guest memory, guest ballooned memory, consumed hypervisor CPU/Mem %, VMWare tools status, a few other things.
I do not know of any other way to get VMWare-internal details into EM12c unless you were to write your own connector between vSphere and OEM.
I previously wrote up a blog post with my thoughts after installing it (http://pardydba.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/first-thoughts-bluemedoras-oracle-enterprise-manager-plugin-for-vmware/) -- there's a new version out since I wrote the post that adds additional features like provisioning and scaling, but most of the interface and functionality is still as I described it at the time.
(Disclaimer: they previously ran a promotion where one could receive a free lifetime license to monitor X number of VMs with one year of free support/upgrades; I took advantage of this and thus did not pay for the product. Other than taking part in this promotion, I haven't received any compensation from Blue Medora.)
-Brian
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Thu Aug 08 2013 - 20:12:15 CEST