vSAN Performance Monitor VMware Fling

MonitoringVirtuallyWired5

Today I was excited to test drive a new Fling, vSAN Performance Monitor. The deployment and setup were very straight forward, and within 10 minutes of it running, I was visualising vSAN performance metrics!

Step 1

Firstly head over to the VMware Flings site and download the OVA and user manual from > https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vsan-performance-monitor

Step 2

Follow the usual steps to deploy an OVA into you vSphere Environment, if you are unsure please refer to the user manual. The only configuration setting required by the deployment wizard is a root password.

Step 3

Once the deployment is completed, you will need to power on and configure it. Note: I received the following incompatibility error when trying to power on the appliance.

No host is compatible with the virtual machine. The guest operating system ‘vmwarePhoton64Guest’ is not supported. 

Step 4

I’m not sure if this issue is isolated to my vSphere lab, but the workaround was as simple as performing a VM Hardware Version Upgrade. I edited the compatibility to 6.7 and later for my lab, however, 6.5 should work too.

I was now able to successfully power on the VM. Now open up the console and log in with “root” and the password you specified during the OVA deployment, if that doesn’t work you can try the default password “vmware“.

Step 5

You will need to edit the Telegraf configuration file by editing the telegraf.conf file located in /root directory.

vim /root/telegraf.conf

At the bare minimum, you will need to update the vCenter connection and credential information. Since I’m only running this in my home lab I also skipped the vCenter certificate verification by setting the value for insecure_skip_verify = true and commenting out ssl_ca path #ssl_ca = “/path/to/ca”, for more information on this or the other configurations, please refer to the user manual.

# update vCenter credential here 
vcenters = [ "https://vca.vmlabs.cloud/sdk" ]
username = "<Your vCenter Username>"
password = "<Your vCenter Password>" 

# provide CA certificate or skip verify 
insecure_skip_verify = true 
#ssl_ca = "/path/to/ca"

Save the Telegraf.conf and exit the editor.

Step 6

Use the command docker-compose up -d to start all components in detached mode. Run docker ps to verify if Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana have been successfully started. There should be three containers with STATUS of “Up”.

docker-compose up -d
docker ps

Step 7

You should now be able to login into Grafana UI on http://VM-IP:3000 using the default username and password admin/admin. You will be prompted to change when you first log in.

Step 8

Navigate to Dashboards and select Manage to see all available dashboards. To get an overview of your vSAN clusters select the dashboard vSAN Overview. It may take a little while for metrics to come through but just be patient.

That’s It! I’m now visualising some key metrics for my vSAN Cluster.

5 comments Add yours
  2. Pingback: VSANTOP Command-Line Tool - New in vSAN 6.7 Update 3 - VirtuallyWired

  3. Thanks for this. Is the data persistent once the vm has been rebooted or containers are restarted?

    Reply

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