Performance

In this post I’m revisiting my work on how to monitor a vCenter appliance with the help of REST APIs and open-source tools like InfluxDB and Grafana

We’re always looking out for new ways to visualize our performance data. Most often to aid our troubleshooting, but sometimes most for fun. This is one of those times. Let’s check out how we can visualize our compute usage across the world!

After moving my blog to the Hugo platform hosted on Netlify I lost the uptime monitoring I had through Jetpack on Wordpress. As I’ve worked quite a bit with Grafana I knew about their Worldping service, but I haven’t had any real need to test it before now. Now I had the perfect reason for checking it out.

This post is a (late) follow-up on a previous post I did about exploring the monitoring endpoints of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and an addition to the vSphere Performance blog series. Now we will add performance metrics and health status of the VCSA to our monitoring solution. We’ll utilize the REST APIs in vCenter and feed the data into our Influx database and visualize it in Grafana. In vCenter we have the Appliance Management page also refered to as the VAMI.

Last week I did a session about Performance monitoring at VMworld Europe in Barcelona. The session was part of the VMTN Techtalks with vBrownBag. The slides (without the video demos) and the script used in the demo is available at Github. The session was recorded and can be seen on Youtube. Thanks to all that attended the session and to those watched it live on Twitch or have seen the recording afterwards.

Recently there was a new release of Telegraf, a monitoring agent from the guys that built InfluxDB. This new version, 1.8.0, comes with a plugin for vSphere which I’m pretty excited about! Previously I’ve been testing Telegraf for monitoring some Linux VMs and also my InfluxDB servers and the agent works as expected and it’s as easy to use as the other products in the TICK stack from Influx. If you’ve followed my blog series about building a monitoring solution for vSphere and other infrastructure components you know that I’ve pulled metrics with PowerCLI scripts.

The schedule builder for VMworld Europe 2018 in Barcelona is finally live and sessions can be scheduled. For the first time I will have a session at VMworld, as one of the vBrownBag/VMTN community sessions, and I’m really excited about this. It is very cool that these community sessions are available in the schedule builder and can be scheduled as other sessions. My session is: **Realtime Performance Monitoring - For FREE [VMTN5524E]**

For a long time, actually since we migrated to the VCSA in 6.5 last year, I’ve wanted to utilize the REST API in the appliance to have some monitoring of them. For several reasons I’ve had to put that on hold, one of them being that there seems to be something wrong with the back-end authentication calls. I get authentication errors on certain calls no matter which user I am logged in with (also the vsphere.

I had the privilege of delivering 3 sessions at VMUG Norway this week in Oslo, Trondheim and Bergen. With the extremely nice weather in Norway this week in mind the attendance were great and as always the discussions were valuable. My session on vSphere Performance monitoring were the short version of the blog series I did about how we built our solution for doing performance monitoring of vSphere with InfluxDB and Grafana, and how we easily can customize with adding metrics and datasources.

I’ll be speaking at VMUG Norway’s meetings this May. As always there will be “three sessions in three cities”. Oslo, May 29th Trondheim, May 30th Bergen, May 31st The topic for my session will be how we have built our own vSphere Performance monitoring solution which I’ve also done a blog series about. The VMUG meetings are free, for more information check out https://www.vmug.com/norway. I hope you’re able to join!