Infrastructure Management can identify potential problems before customers are impacted. Infrastructure Management can help reduce the number of outages, as well as improve the meantime between failures, thus increasing customer satisfaction, and keeping and maintaining service-level agreements. The longer Infrastructure Management collects data in your environment, the more accurate Infrastructure Management becomes, allowing you to identify problems even more quickly and accurately.
This topic focuses on monitoring VMware vSphere; however, you can apply this process to any environment or combination of environments supported by Infrastructure Management.
Before following the procedures in this topic, you should be familiar with the following concepts:
This topic requires the following Infrastructure Management components. It is recommended that you read the overviews for each component before continuing:
BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server
BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Integration Service
BMC PATROL Agent for Infrastructure Management
Central Monitoring Administration architecture
Infrastructure Management administrator console
Note
There are many user roles involved in the deployment, operation, and management of Infrastructure Management. Your company may employ the roles as described below, consolidate them into fewer roles, or divide them into roles with more granular responsibilities and may have other titles for these roles.
The following roles are required to complete the procedures in this topic:
Before you begin these procedures you must have installed the following Infrastructure Management components:
For detailed instructions about installing these components, see Installing. After successfully installing these components, continue with the following tasks.
The following tasks are required to identify that there is a problem or impending problem in your environment.
Required roles: BMC PATROL Administrator and Infrastructure Management Administrator
From Central Monitoring Administration, create a monitor installation package that includes the BMC PATROL Agent and BMC PATROL for VMware vSphere monitoring solution, by following these steps:
For detailed instructions, see Creating and editing component installation packages. When you are creating your monitor installation package, you will select VMware vSphere and PATROL Agent for your operating system from the Available list. As part of the package creation process, you must include the host name and port where the Integration Service is running (the default port is 3183), as well as a Central Monitoring Administration (CMA) tag. The CMA tag will be assigned to the PATROL Agent to help Infrastructure Management assign monitoring policies that you will create later.
Download and install the monitor installation package you just created on the server where VMware vSphere is installed. For details about installing the monitor installation package, see Downloading and installing an installation package.
After the monitor installation package is downloaded and installed, the BMC PATROL Agent automatically is connected to the Integration Service, and the Integration Service automatically is connected to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server.
Required roles: BMC PATROL Administrator, Infrastructure Management Administrator, and Virtual Infrastructure Administrator
To configure Infrastructure Management to warn you when there is a problem or impending problem with VMware vSphere, you must understand the concepts of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), baselines, and thresholds, as described in How baselines, thresholds and Key Performance Indicators work together to generate events in the operator console. To set up thresholds for the various metrics (attributes) of VMware vSphere, you can use Central Monitoring Administration to create a policy. This policy can be applied to any PATROL Agent that has a matching Central Monitoring Administration (CMA) tag.
For instructions about setting up a policy, see Creating or editing a monitoring policy. To monitor VMware vSphere, the following steps apply:
Required role: Infrastructure Management Operator
When the Integration Service connects to the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server, events will begin to display in the operator console. This does not mean that data from the PATROL Agent and monitoring solutions (also called Knowledge Modules) is actually being brought into the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server. The events displaying in the operator console could be events generated by the BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server as it monitors itself.
To verify that data is being brought into Infrastructure Management, log into the operator console. In the Main drawer of the Navigation pane, click Abnormalities. Ensure that the devices that you have added are displaying in the in the Device View tab in the right pane.
Select one or more of the devices in the Device View tab and click Show Graphs. If data is being brought into Infrastructure Management, data points will be visible on the graph that is displayed. Depending on the polling frequency of the attributes that you are monitoring, it may take 5 to 10 minutes for data to be displayed in the graph.
Required role: Infrastructure Management Operator
After you have configured your monitor thresholds and established reliable baselines, the events coming into the Infrastructure Management Console will warn you when there is a problem or impending problem with one of your monitored devices or services. Event severity levels are one of the ways to help you prioritize what events you handle first.