If you’re a user of vCenter Operations (vCops) Manager’s advanced dashboards, you probably know what a vCops adapter is. An adapter allows you to connect vCops to an external system and retrieve performance and capacity information from that system. Adapters can be used to connect vCops to storage systems, network devices and/or a hyperic server for application-/os-level monitoring.

I have previously introduced the NetApp adapter, which collects data from your NetApp filers. I’ve since learned that the original NetApp adapter (as described in the article) has been deprecated. A company named Blue Medora has acquired the adapter and now offers the new vCops Management Pack for NetApp storage solutions. Blue Medora is a software company that focuses on expanding the capabilities of leading operations management solutions like vCenter Operations Manager.

Let’s take a closer look at this NetApp Management Pack for vCenter Operations Manager.

Introducing the NetApp vCops Management Pack

Blue Medora’s NetApp Management Pack comes as a PAK file (for the vCops vApp) and can be installed by uploading the file to your vCops appliance. Note that a license is required for the Management Pack to work.

The Management Pack includes an (enhanced) adapter for data collection, and several dashboards created by Blue Medora’s developers. The new enhanced adapter that comes with the management pack now includes pre-defined relationships, and on top of that received a lot of extra counters. This will definitely help you in creating NetApp dashboards in the vCops environment.

To get an idea of the available counters check the screen dump to the right. I will further investigate all the available counters in a future article.

NetApp Management Pack Installation

The installation of the Management Pack is pretty straightforward and similar to the installation of other vCops adapters/management packs.

Download the installation PAK file from the Blue Medora website; Upload it to vCops; Start the ‘describe’ process; Install the license; Do the initial configuration of the adapter;

Step two can be started in vCenter Operations Manager’s administration interface, while steps 3-5 are all carried out in vCops custom interface.

Note that you will need to have installed NetApp OnCommand Unified Manager Core (f.k.a. DFM) in your environment, because the Management Pack will connect to NetApp OnCommand for data collection. A direct connection to the NetApp filer is not possible.

Exploring the dashboards

As stated before, the good people at Blue Medora have included some dashboards so you can leverage the adapter immediately. The package has about 10 different dashboards, including:

A NetApp System Explorer to get insight into how your NetApp systems are doing;

Varios Top N Dashboards which include information on for example the top 5 read data throughput for volumes, the top 5 disk IOPS per system, the top 5 health scores for LUNs, etc.

Different custom NetApp Heatmaps on various NetApp key performance indicators.

The NetApp System Explorer has an extensive dashboard that shows you how your NetApp storage system is doing. The Blue Medora Management Pack identifies the relationships between the different NetApp objects, and these relationships are included in the dashboard. After selecting an object, additional information about the object is displayed on the dashboard.

The Top N Dashboards provide information on the top 5 maximums for the NetApp system, volumes, luns, etc. For example, the Top N NetApp Luns dashboard includes information on health, latency, throughput and ions:

One last dashboard I want to elaborate on, is the NetApp System Overview dashboard. This dashboard provides (unsurprisingly) a system overview of the available storage systems. Take a look:

To conclude

I hope this article has given you an idea of what you can do with the NetApp Management Pack by Blue Medora. Of course, you can also use all the available counters to create your own dashboards. In a coming article I will show you how you can create your own dashboards using this management pack, so stay tuned. You can leave your e-mail address in the “subscribe to this blog” box on the right side of the screen.