vC Ops and Hyperic – Dynamic Duo of Enterprise Management

In this post I will explain how to configure vC Ops 5.6 and Hyperic
5.0 integration. A few requirements and assumptions need to be stated
up front.

– You own vC Ops 5.6 Advanced or Enterprise and have access to the Custom UI.

–
You have installed and configured Hyperic 5.0 (I highly recommend the
new Hyperic vApp – easy to install and configure plus it scales nicely).

Why
would you want to do this? Very briefly, Hyperic adds a capability to
combine metrics analysis from the guest OS (as well as physical systems)
with the analytics already being derived for the vSphere environment.
Basically, there’s only so much that vC Ops can “see” via the vCenter
API and it’s important to understand what’s going on in the guest OS on a
VM to have a more complete picture of performance and health.

Onward and upward, time to get this working.

First, you will
need to obtain the Hyperic adapter for vC Ops from VMware. Once you’ve
downloaded the adapter, connect to the Admin UI of your vC Ops UI VM and
log in as the admin user. Under the “Update” tab you will find the
option to browse for the adapter file (should be a *.pak file). Press
the “Update” button and accept the EULA. The install will proceed and
you will have nice series of tasks in the Update Status window.

 

Once this is done, you will now log into the Custom UI of your vC Ops UI VM where
you will click on “Support” link in the upper right section of the UI.
In the Support page, select the “Info” tab to get to Adapters Info.

 You will need to allow vC Ops to initialize (or “Describe” as it is
called) this adapter so you can use it. Click on the small gear icon in
the “Adapters Info” section to start the describe process. Just select
“Yes” on the confirmation diaglog. You can refresh the “Info” tab
after a minute to make sure that your adapter has been added to the list
– here you see I’ve already described a Hyperic adapter.

 Next you’ll need to configure an adapter instance of the Hyperic adapter to point to your Hyperic server.  From the “Environment” pull down menu, select Configuration > Adapter Instances. 

This will bring up the Adapter Instances manager where you can
add/edit/delete adapter instances. You will select the green plus icon
in the manager to add the Hyperic instance.

This is a simple dialog and you can see
the fields I have completed. The “Adapter Instance Name” can be
whatever you wish, I recommend you make it descriptive as you would in
naming a VM or server. If you are using the Hyperic vApp, note that you
will use –

• DB Type = PostgreSql
• Port = 5432 (NOT the default 9432)
• DB Name = HQ

The final item “Credential” you may now add by clicking, the “Add” link (** thank you Captain Obvious)

Again here
is an example completed. The “Instance name” is a descriptive name you
provide – it doesn’t have to match the adapter instance, I just like to
do that for simplicity. The user name is hqadmin for DB access if you
are using the vApp. Once completed, click OK to return to the instance
configuration.

At this
point you can confirm you settings by clicking the “Test” button – if
all is well, you’ll get a pop up like the one above. If not, you’ll get
a pop up that is really not helpful at all but never fear, just
validate the settings and credential and try again. You may also want
to make sure you can ping the Hyperic DB server from the vC Ops
Analytics VM. That’s the extent of troubleshooting I’ll provide here,
but feel free to leave questions in the comments section – or even
better, head over the VMware’s Community and post your question in the
vC Ops or Hyperic community (I regularly monitor the vC Ops community).

Now that your adapter instance is configured and working, head over
the the Environment Overview page and after about 5 – 10 minutes you
will have some new resources. Open and select Adapter Instances – Hyperic Adapter Instances – (your instance name) to see.

Notice I now have good stuff like various platforms (Windows, Linux)
and some services.

That’s all it takes. I’ll have a future post
on creating relationships between vCenter and Hyperic resources as well
as some custom dashboards featuring Hyperic metrics.

*this post was created with a trial version of ScreenSteps