As the complexity of virtual infrastructures increases it’s becoming harder to manage using conventional monitoring tools which were built with a more static environment in mind. In March 2011 VMware released the vCenter Operations product (vCOPS) to address this pain point. I’ve been running the 60 day trial at my company and now that the trial’s ending it’s time to share my thoughts.
What is vCOPS?
To quote the product page at VMware;
VMware vCenter Operations uses patented analytics and powerful visualizations to automate performance, capacity and configuration management. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance problems. VMware vCenter Operations provides capacity management to optimize resource usage and policy-based configuration management to assure compliance and eliminate sprawl and configuration drift. (emphasis my own)
The key differentiator is this promise to learn and understand the context of multiple metrics (CPU, memory, storage and network) and provide root cause analysis without you needing to manually define thresholds, benchmarks etc. Bear in mind that vCOPS is an infrastructure monitoring solution rather than application layer (which is more the domain on VMware’s AppSpeed, Quest’s solutions or ManageEngine’s Application Manager). I’m not the first blogger to cover this product so here’s some reading to get you up to speed;
- This great article by Bernd Harzog covers all editions of vCOPS along with some great analysis of it’s strengths and weaknesses.
- Eric Sloof’s blogpost describes how the product works in a bit more detail
- Kendrick Coleman’s post covers his own thoughts with some interesting comments.
- Chris Dearden has written an interesting post on monitoring including where he sees vCOPS fitting in.
While technically a ‘v1’ release the product comes from VMware’s purchase of Integrien (in August 2010) where it was originally marketed as VMAlive. Integrien have been working on the patented algorithms for several years so while the integration and VMware branding are new the guts of the product are not. VMware have published some YouTube videos or you can listen to VM Communities podcast #119 to get an overview of what vCOPS can offer. Continue reading vCenter Operations 1.0 – Pros and Cons