Introduction to Stretch Performance Monitoring Management Pack
The Stretch Performance Monitoring Management Pack is a solution for VMware Aria Operations that enables advanced capacity and performance monitoring of distributed stretch clusters by automating the collection and aggregation of infrastructure data.
The primary goal is to eliminate the manual definition of hundreds of supermetrics, managing complex policies, and setting up object relationships. By introducing a dedicated, standardized object model, it ensures consistent reporting and easy portability across different environments.
How does it Work?
The Management Pack operates by dynamically discovering Aria Operations Custom Groups of type "Stretch". These groups act as input and typically contain virtual machines and hosts belonging to a specific site. Based on these groups, the management pack collects relevant metrics (such as CPU and memory usage), and automatically aggregates them into a new, stable custom object type called Stretch Cluster.
This approach ensures that as soon as a new Stretch Custom Group is created, it is automatically picked up and processed, providing immediate visibility without further configuration.
Features:
- Reduced manual configuration: Significantly reduces the need to create and maintain supermetrics and policies manually.
- Dynamic Discovery: Automatically handles new Stretch-type custom groups based on naming conventions.
- Unified Reporting: Standardized metric definitions across all environments and clusters.
- Automated Failover Calculation: Instant insights into cross-site capacity requirements.
- Business Hours support: Metrics can be calculated seperately for business hours to improve trend accuracy.
Benefits
This Management Pack simplifies monitoring of stretch clusters across distributed environments and provides better visibility into capacity, utilization, and failover scenarios.
Centralized view: Data aggregation from multiple physical locations into a single logical object improves visibility. Instead of analyzing separate clusters, hosts, and virtual machines, users can work with one unified view that represents the entire distributed environment.
Failover Readiness: Collected data includes cross-referenced resource utilization (CPU and memory) to calculate exactly how much capacity is actively required if one site fails. This ensures administrators receive the essential quantitative insights necessary for safe disaster recovery planning.
Reduced operational effort: By automating the collection and aggregation of key metrics, the Management Pack reduces the need to manually create and maintain large numbers of supermetrics and complex policies. This helps reduce configuration errors and makes the solution easier to maintain over time.
Business-Aware Forecasting: Real-time metrics are intelligently filtered through configurable Business Hours. This delivers immediate visibility into peak shift utilization while preventing nighttime or weekend spikes or drops from distorting long-term trends and capacity predictions.