Feeding EMC SMARTS Events to VMware vCenter Operations (vC OPS)

Hi,

at the previous posts:

Permalink to EMC SMARTS – Part I – Overview & Architecture

Permalink to EMC SMARTS – Part 2 – Topology

Permalink to EMC SMARTS – Part 3 – The Codebook explained + DEMO!

I gave you an overview of the EMC “SMARTS” suite of products, it was really just an introduction and there is much more to dive in and I will try to do it in later posts but this time I wanted to show you the integration between SMARTS to VMware vCenter Operations (vC OPS)

It all begins with integration…

as you can see from the diagram above, the SMARTS Adapter integration fits into the management stack and can complement vC OPS in ways that can make it REALLY powerful!, this is a part of the multi millions dollar investment we are making with VMware..

 

What About Network ?

vCenter Operations is great for administrators of virtual environments, but can it also help network administrators?

Yes!

With the EMC SMARTS Adapter, you can now have end to end visibility of your network infrastructure health + Root Cause Analysis, you see, vC OPS can look at your network infrastructure from the “host” perspective but it doesn’t really “see” the network on the physical port / switch level, this is where we come in..

on the screenshot below, you can see a collection of the devices SMARTS sent to the main console of vCOPS..

 

 

Feeding events from vC OPS to EMC SMARTS

on the screenshot below, you can see the main screen of the SMARTS alerts, in this specific screen it just shows the alerts SMARTS generated in their “purest” form, it will also show the alerts vC OPS sent to SMARTS (this can be a bi-directional connection), this type of screen is useful for the operators (NOC) team that normally would like to see the events and correspond to them..

 

Building An Application End to End Monitoring

one of the more powerfull things you can do with vC OPS and SMARTS is to create an application end-to-end view of both the application, vSphere and the physical network infrastructure so for an example you can create an application called “HR” that will be based around a web server, a DB and it’s network / storage components so now, if say, a physical port switch is down you will see the SLA of this application decreases! VERY VERY powerful thing…