From vSAN to vCenter: Discover Complete Visibility into your VMware Stack with LogicMonitor

Hey folks, it’s that time of year again. I’m not talking about the end of summer; I’m talking about VMworld, of course!

VMworld has been my jam for the last few years here at LogicMonitor, but this year I’m focused on some other cool projects hitting the market soon, including LM Exchange. We’re already seeing strong community engagement through our forums, but I can’t wait to see what awesome LogicModules and Integrations users like you will contribute. I’ve also been spending a lot of time on our Topology Mapping feature, which is powered by LogicModules and is the foundation of our AIOps platform.

We have a great line up from the LogicMonitor team joining you in San Francisco at booth #1833 to answer questions, and show you how new features like topology and anomaly detection help you manage your business, avoid issues, and get the most out of your monitoring platform.

Along with some of the major releases rolled out over the last few months, we’ve also seen great additions to our VMware monitoring coverage. If you follow the release notes, you may have seen that LogicMonitor now supports monitoring of vSAN enabled clusters, as well as the vCenter Server Appliance, and Topology Mapping for VMware objects.

Topology map of VMware networking

vSAN is VMware’s virtualized storage offering. Essentially, it combines storage across a vCenter cluster into a single pool that can be shared amongst the cluster. This allows users to get the benefits of shared storage without shelling out for a hardware SAN. It also allows users to scale easily by adding more disks and/or hosts into the pool.

The flexibility comes with a price though; you have to manage and maintain your vSAN cluster yourself. However, if you’re using LogicMonitor we’ve already got your back. We dug deep into the vSAN API to give you insight into everything you’ll need to ensure your cluster is running smoothly.

Each host in a vSAN cluster contributes some “capacity” and “cache” drives to the vSAN. The cache drives are flash storage, but the capacity drives can be magnetic, or flash if you really need the performance. Even with the magnetic capacity drives, the flash cache will absorb rights and reads to help increase performance. LogicMonitor gives you insight into the performance of both types of disks.

VMware vSAN device latency

You’ll be able to monitor standard read/write throughput, brag about your IOPS, and even dig into the latency at the firmware, HBA, and guest VM level. This alone will give you a huge leg up on keeping vSAN running smooth, but we get a lot more too.

Top 10 VMs with the highest IOPS

We can also show you throughput, IOPS, and latency measurements at the host, cluster, and disk group levels. We also pass vSAN cluster health check results through to LogicMonitor so you have everything in one place. Along with the monitoring you should already have for the network equipment that’s supporting your vSAN environment, you’ll have all the insight you need to track down any performance issue, wherever it is.

VMware vSAN outstanding I/O

If you didn’t buy cache drives from the HCL, we’ve still got your back. We’ll also track the health of your drives, so when you wear those flash drives out with a heavy write workload, we’ll let you know when it’s time to replace them (and vSAN will keep you from losing any data).

As with most things in LogicMonitor, it’s super easy to get it going. If you have VMware monitoring setup, just import the LogicModules and you’re good to go. If you have no VMware monitoring setup, go here. Finally, if you’re attending VMworld, go check this out in action at the LogicMonitor booth #1833.