In daily life of an administrator worst day is when you’ve to co-relate logs across the stack for performance troubleshooting or when you need to troubleshoot an issue which is not consistent. Usually for such issues you’ll need to enable continuous log collection and hope that issue will reappear during the log collection time. Phew!

But gone are those days where you were reactive in troubleshooting, now with CloudIQ you can be proactive.

CloudIQ is SaaS based monitoring application which is available to all DellEMC customers without any additional investment.

Though CloudIQ allows customers to have centralized monitoring of DellEMC storage products, proactive health score and predictive analytics, but this blog is about VMware monitoring with CloudIQ. With latest update of CloudIQ now it supports monitoring of entire VMware landscape (along with storage and Connectrix).

As I have already mentioned CloudIQ has integration with VMware for end-to-end monitoring for the virtualization environments. For enabling the CloudIQ to collect and report VMware data you need to download the CloudIQ collector, which can be downloaded directly from the CloudIQ portal (details below)

Once the collector is downloaded follow the steps (step 3 in above exhibit) listed on the CloudIQ collector download page.

Note that single instance of CloudIQ collector supports collecting data for upto 60000 virtual machines. Once collector is enabled it will take ~24 hours to populate the data on CloudIQ portal.

There are many details available on CloudIQ and more enhancements are getting added very frequently. You can refer to this CloudIQ whitepaper which has details around CloudIQ overview. In this blog post is to highlight few CloudIQ features which I personally like.

Storage LUN to Datastore to VM Mapping

From the CloudIQ you can see the list of all the virtual machines which running on particular datastore. This is great asset as you no more have to login to vCenter console for this.

Co-relate VM Performance With Anomaly Detection

You can view all required performance charts for virtual machine in single view. Additionally CloudIQ performance charts will highlight any performance anomalies during the last 24 hours. In below example you can see that for selected virtual machine storage response time was suddenly increased and went back to normal.

End to End Map

Customers who have tried to deploy monitoring tools understand that it’s very difficult to get the application/virtual machine footprint map in the data center. Usually this is very useful if you want to understand all the dependent infrastructure components which you application touches in the virtualization stack. CloudIQ gives you out of box functionality to provide virtual machine end-to-end map — from Virtual machine to storage volumes/LUNs

These are the top 3 VMware monitoring features which I personally like. Apart from this there are many features including but not limited to

• Tracking configuration changes per VM level
• Storage path details for each datastore

Also I would like to mention that CloudIQ can be accessed using

• Web view using any device having connectivity to CloudIQ
• Mobile application – Supported on Apple and Android devices