VMware’s vRealize Operations Manager is a great tool for monitoring not only your VMware environment but also the underlying components utilized by this virtualization solution. vROps has the ability to incorporate many other solutions, in order to provide what most IT departments search for; a single point to monitor the environment.

As the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) begins to take over, it is more evident that the main components that comprise IT infrastructures include virtualization of servers and network, as well as storage. Monitoring such technologies can be cumbersome and may require many tools, unless we leverage vROps management packs. I have utilized other tools such as native vendor tools, tools that offer management packs as well, but I have not been able to find the granularity that I need to monitor a large environment, specially when it comes to graphical representation. A picture is worth a thousand words.

After installing vROps 6.0, I started to leverage its new features, but I wanted more. I searched for storage integration and luckily came across Blue Medora’s NetApp management pack for vROps. This management pack provides not only granular visibility to the storage arrays, but more importantly how those arrays, volumes, and LUNs are associated with the VMware environment. This solution also allows for the familiar vROps drill down of information in order to aid in the troubleshooting process. This and many other solutions can be found at VSX site (VMware Solutions Exchange) https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store.

The installation of the Blue Medora pack is very simple and straight forward, as long as you meet all the requirements. The most obvious requirements include VMware’s vROps and NetApp’s OnCommand Unified Manager Core (DFM), which acts as a proxy between vROps and the NetApp arrays to obtain information. As previously mentioned, you can obtain the management pack from VSX or Blue Medora’s site for a 30 day free trial. After obtaining the pack, add this to your vROpS solutions and configure.

You can also tune what and how much to collect depending on the entity, by expanding the advanced settings during configuration. These settings can be changed after deployment as well.

That is pretty much it. After a successful deployment, you will notice about a dozen new dashboards on vROps’ home page.