The question every IT admin should ask from himself is simple: “Do I know what is going on in my Virtual Datacenter?” If the answer is “yes” then either you have set up a decent monitoring system or you are one of those highly skilled admins who can quickly analyze vCenter performance graphs. For those who answered “no” or “sort of”, it is time to look at VMware vCenter Operations (vCops).
My first impression about the product was that it must be built for iPhone — it was just that beautiful. So, do I need this fancy view to look at my vSphere that makes me feel like a lazy admin who can barely tell red from green? Yes, as there was more to it than just the beauty.
Firstly, I really am lazy (it is the human nature), but as a result of clever inventions like this I’m going to have more time for meaningful tasks as I no longer have to scroll through hundreds of performance counters in vCenter. Secondly, I cannot imagine how much time I would need to spend in a huge datacenter just to make sure that it is in good health. Nowadays, the admins also have responsibilities other than pure vSphere administration, and this can only be achieved productively with effective tools. Thirdly, vCops has a nice feature that allows me to “look into the future”. So, even if I don’t know for sure when my ESX will run out of memory then vCops will tell me.
Speaking of knowing what is going on; vCops has really good approach to measure it. For every counter it reads from vCenter, it examines its past behavior and uses clever algorithms to determine what should be considered “normal”. Anything that is significantly different from normal will result in lowered “health” score of the affected system, allowing me to focus my attention to where it is really needed.
In conclusion, I would certainly vote for this “lazy admin’s iPhoneish-looking monitoring tool”. Not only because its user interface is simply cool and beautiful, but because VMware itself knows best how to monitor their own system, and because it makes performance troubleshooting also kind of fun.