Simplivity Health Check and Monitoring

[Ogy_Ramos]

Hello guys,

Good Day!

We've recently implemented 2 nodes of Simplivity on our environment and I'm quite new with it. Just want to ask if there is a best practice or standards on how we monitor the health check our Simplivity Servers so that I can include it on our daily routine checks.

Thank you!

[scott_svt]

Hi @Ogy_Ramos,

Thanks for your post - It's an interesting question for new users.

How far you want to go, depends on what you are intersted in capturing and the tools you have at your disposal. This can range from a basic queck for alerts and alarms in vCenter (all HPE SimpliVity alarms are reflected against the objects directly in the vCenter inventory), right the way through a scrape of the REST API, where you can begin to generate trending data around capacity, number of backups, VM growth etc. Obviously this takes some coding skills, but you may have this in-house.

Perhaps if you could share the kind of checks that you like to perform for your standard vCenter environments? I can then match the same kind of content from the HPE SimpliVity side.

Thanks,

Scott

[Ogy_Ramos]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your reply! I think the basic check for alarms and alerts will be the best foundation for us newbies. Currently when I'm exploring around the vCenter i tend to click every button that I can but to sum it up I still don't know which one needs to be prioritized. Hope you can give me a guideline regarding this.

Thank you very much!

Ogy_Ramos

[scott_svt]

Hi @Ogy_Ramos,

Perfect - Good to clarify these things! :-)

All you need to focus on are the vCenter Alerts. These will give you key insight in to what is going on with the system and you can act accordingly. They are detailed here:

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00049139en_us&docLocale=en_US

The other place you want to keep an eye on is the main dashboard under the HPE SimpliVity view in vCenter. This will show you where you with regards logical VM data, logical backup data and on-disk capacity usage. I know there is quite a lot of data here, but it should start to make sense quickly. If you need any clarification, you can seek any specific information here. If you have an issue, or even think you have a problem, you can always open a case for a more formal analysis.

Thanks,

Scott

[Steve.Thompson]

Scott-

You mentioned creating base lines..We too, are new to Simplivity and would like to implement best practices/KPIs on our environment.  Seems like monthly or quarterly baselines would help determine growth/use rates.  Looking for a best practice to perform every week/month/quarter, etc.

Thanks,

Steve

[scott_svt]

@st,

We do not really provide best practices here, as we cannot define what is 'healthy' in terms of trending. The 'health' of trending data is defined by what is expected, and that is very environment specific. At a high level, I would be looking at VM and backup growth (in numbers), i.e. are policies being used correctly; is the growth rate expected? In addition, I would be looking at capacity growth (in GB/TB); again, is it in line with what is expected? Ultimately these metrics are no different to those that you might use for your VMware estate generally. How do manage CPU, RAM and VM growth today? HPE SimpliVity simply adds backups and capacity to that list, and it probably requires a similar level of granularity.

I hope that provides some level of context, but let me know if you need more information, or would like te flesh out anything specific.

Thanks,

Scott