Vsphere Monitoring Template
Template built by
Telegraf Plugins used:
Included Resources:
- 1 Telegraf Configuration
- 1 Dashboard:
vsphere.yml - 1 bucket:
'vsphere' - 1 label:
'vsphere'
Quick Install
If you have your InfluxDB credentials configured in the CLI, you can install this template with:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/influxdata/community-templates/master/vsphere/vsphere.yml
vSphere Monitoring Dashboard
What is vSphere?
Formerly known as VMWare Infrastructure, vSphere is an industry-leading compute virtualization platform that is the first step towards application modernization at many organizations. It was recently rebuilt from the ground up with native Kubernetes functionality, which has allowed vSphere customers to modernize a collective 70 million+ workloads.
vSphere allows modern, containerized applications to be run alongside existing enterprise applications. The major benefit is that this delivers a developer-ready infrastructure with little effort required, allowing developers to drop in enterprise-grade Kubernetes on existing infrastructure (using Tanzu) within an hour or less in most cases. This paves the way to unify DevOps and IT teams, simplifying cloud operations dramatically.
vSphere comprises:
- ESXi — a hypervisor that runs on host systems to manage VMs, allocating resources as needed
- vCenter Server — the central point for creating, starting and stopping VMs, and performing other management tasks
- vCenter Client — a Windows application for remote access of vCenter Server
- VMFS — the vSphere file system
Why vSphere monitoring?
Your applications rely on a performant and highly available infrastructure so it is important to implement effective vSphere monitoring. Doing so will help you increase the availability of your servers, services, and applications. Improving the availability of your application will improve the performance of your app and allow your organization to engage in more valuable service-level agreements with your customers.
In order to manage uptime, you will need to detect server and OS failures in real time. vSphere, powered by InfluxDB, is monitoring streaming data for dips in performance and can alert you immediately.
By combining metrics, you can troubleshoot problems in your VMs. For example, low disk space will create write latency, so looking at these metrics together can give you a picture of where you might want to provision more disk space. Big spikes in network traffic can be caused by good things like marketing events or issues like mail system meltdowns and cyberattacks. Monitoring your systems will give you a quick heads-up and the ability to adapt.
You can also centralize configuration by setting up scripts to install the software on each VM as a package, which reduces the deployment time for each new machine. vSphere can manage software upgrades, patching, and firmware updates easier and less disruptive for both on-premises and remote in the same platform.
How to use vSphere Monitoring Template
Once your InfluxDB credentials have been properly configured in the CLI, you can install the vSphere monitoring template using the Quick Install command. Once installed, the data for the dashboard will be populated by the included vSphere Telegraf configuration, which contains the relevant vSphere Input. Note that you might need to customize the input configuration to better serve your needs, including by specifying a new input value. All of this will depend on how your organization currently runs vSphere.
To find out more information about environmental variables in the Telegraf configuration, consult the following link.
InfluxDB and vSphere are a potent combination because they're both really easy to set up and you can start monitoring immediately to get insight into your systems. vSphere is a lightweight and easy app that will help you get started with containerization quickly without a huge investment in time and software, but you still have the power of the time series database InfluxDB and its ecosystem of tools.
Key vSphere monitoring metrics to monitor
Some of the most important vSphere monitoring metrics that you should proactively monitor include:
- Uptime: The percentage of time a computer was running and available.
- CPU: The processing speed of applications.
- RAM: The state of memory across your systems.
- Network Usage: The data being sent in and out of your systems.
- Total Disk Latency (Write and Read): The time it takes your disks to respond to a request.
- Storage Adapter Latency: The speed of your server adapter.
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