Monitoring your project

As you use Google Cloud VMware Engine, you're likely to encounter situations where you want to troubleshoot an issue in production or test whether a process works before fully committing. Monitoring and alerting tools can help you operate your environment efficiently based on data generated in your private clouds.

Monitor your project using one or more of the following options:

• Dashboards, alerting, and metrics in Google Cloud Observability
• Syslog messages that you forward to a remote server
• VMware Aria Operations
• vCenter monitoring tools

Google Cloud Observability

You can use Cloud Monitoring and other parts of Google Cloud Observability to monitor, troubleshoot, and operate services at scale. Cloud Monitoring helps you gain visibility into the performance, availability, and health of your applications and infrastructure.

To forward metrics from your private cloud, you define collectors, sources, and destinations in BindPlane, a solution provided by Monitoring partner, Blue Medora. For configuration details, see Setting up Cloud Monitoring.

Note: Google Cloud Observability products are priced by data volume. You can use the free data usage allotments to get started with no upfront fees or commitments.

Cloud Monitoring dashboards

When you use Cloud Monitoring, you can install predefined dashboards for VMware Engine with minimal setup or configuration. These dashboards provide you with aggregated information across all BindPlane sources that you specify:

• Overview dashboard: High-level view that lists key resources like data centers, clusters, and VMs.
• Contention dashboard: Resource utilization for storage, CPU, memory, and networking to help you locate top VMs and hosts by resource demand.

Cloud Monitoring alerts

You can use metrics from your BindPlane integration to trigger alerts and notifications based on custom thresholds and incidents. For example, you can have Cloud Monitoring send you an SMS notification when someone creates a new VM in your private cloud.

Forwarding syslog messages to a remote server

Google Cloud VMware Engine provides a configuration option for sending syslog messages to your remote syslog server. This private cloud configuration lets you collate and process syslog messages using remote logs and monitoring systems.

For configuration details, see Forwarding syslog messages to a remote server.

VMware Aria Operations

VMware Aria Operations identifies issues in monitored system components and suggests corrective actions you can take to fix them. VMware Aria Operations offers analytical tools to help you review and manipulate object data to reveal hidden issues, identify trends, or drill down to gauge the health of a single object.

VMware Aria Operations is a VMware product that lets you monitor your vCenter environments. You can also view metrics and summarized monitoring data for your VMware Engine private clouds.

For configuration details, see Configuring VMware Aria Operations.

vCenter monitoring tools

In vCenter, VMware provides tools to help you monitor your environment and to locate the source of problems. You can use these tools as part of your ongoing operations and as a supplement to other monitoring options.

For details, see the VMware documentation About vSphere Monitoring and Performance.