Product overview
As an administrator, you must ensure that the infrastructure is always up and running with maximum efficiency. BMC Helix Operations Management and TrueSight Operations Management help you achieve this goal by providing tools to monitor your environment. You need to collect data about your environment to be able to understand its health.
The PATROL Agent and knowledge modules (KMs) are used to collect data in BMC Helix Operations Management and TrueSight Operations Management. A KM is a data collector that also contains monitoring logic. The PATROL Agent provides infrastructure to KMs to collect data.
The following image shows how PATROL Agent and KMs help BMC Helix Operations Management in collecting data for monitoring:
After you install KMs and PATROL Agent, you configure monitor policies. When these policies are enabled, data collection starts. The collected data is shown on the Devices page in the BMC Helix Operations Management and TrueSight Operations Management.
This high level overview of OpenStack and BMC PATROL for OpenStack is meant to give you a basic understanding of the Openstack cloud operating system and how PATROL for OpenStack can be used to monitor it.
OpenStack
OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources across a data center. The system is managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
OpenStack utilizes a modular architecture comprising different components that provide various system storage and services.
Basic OpenStack architecture
PATROL for OpenStack
The PATROL for OpenStack enables users to monitor the OpenStack system and its native services through an integrated BMC Helix Operations Management and TrueSight console. BMC PATROL for OpenStack operates with PATROL Agent, TrueSight console, and BMC Helix Operations Management to monitor the OpenStack system. BMC PATROL for OpenStack contains knowledge in the form of monitor types and attributes. This knowledge is used to monitor, collect data, and analyze OpenStack systems. PATROL for OpenStack allows you to monitor the OpenStack system and many of its native services through an integrated BMC Helix Operations Management and TrueSight console.
BMC PATROL for OpenStack supports the following OpenStack metrics:
- Horizon dashboard—The Horizon dashboard provides a web-based self-service portal to interact with underlying OpenStack services, such as launching an instance, assigning IP addresses, and configuring access controls. PATROL for OpenStack includes an emulation of the dashboard through the TrueSight console
- Hypervisors—The hypervisor presents the guest operating systems with a virtual operating platform and manages the execution of the guest operating systems. Multiple instances of various operating systems may share the virtualized hardware resources.
- Image service—Image (Glance) service provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for disk and server images. Stored images can be used as a template. It can also be used to store and catalog an unlimited number of backups.
- Compute service—The Compute (Nova) service provides management to servers (running virtual machines), VM management, flavors, and diagnostics. This API streamlines day-to-day management tasks and makes managing your cloud straightforward with a fluent design.
- Networking service—Networking (Neutron) is a system for managing networks and IP addresses. OpenStack Networking ensures the network is not a bottleneck or limiting factor in a cloud deployment, and provides users with self-service ability, even over network configurations. This service allows you to configure advanced virtual network topologies. An example of this is per-tenant private networks. The networking service is broken up into networks, subnets, and routers, which are abstractions that mimic the physical layer functionality.
- Storage service—PATROL for OpenStack supports the following OpenStack storage services:
- The Block (Cinder) storage provides a persistent block-level storage solution that enables you to mount drives to cloud servers to scale storage without paying for more compute resources. It can also be leveraged as high-performance storage to server database or I/O-intensive applications.
- Object (Swift) storage is a scalable, redundant storage system. Objects and files are written to multiple disk drives spread throughout servers in the data center, with the OpenStack software responsible for ensuring data replication and integrity across the cluster.
User roles
User Role | Product goal |
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| Learn and understand the product. |
| View all data in the system. |
Technology Specialists |
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Solution Administrators |
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