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vSphere Components as Uptime Infrastructure Monitor Elements

Some VMware vSphere components that act as logical groupings, including datacenters, clusters, resource pools, and vApps, are hierarchically mirrored in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor’s My Infrastructure inventory, and are represented through their reported resource metrics. On the other hand, VMware vSphere components that are actual hosts, whether virtual or physical (i.e., a VMware vCenter server, its component ESX servers,or their respective VMs) are represented in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor as Elements.

When you add a VMware vCenter server as an Element, all of the VMware vSphere components, whether organizational or compute resources, as defined through the vSphere Client, are imported to Uptime Infrastructure Monitor, and their VMware/vSphere-collected metric data is migrated to the Uptime DataStore. Additionally, all ESX servers and VMs also become Elements.

There will be cases where administrators will want to actively manage which ESX server Elements (and subsequently, which VMs) are monitored by Uptime Infrastructure Monitor. For example, licensing constraints may prevent you from monitoring every ESX server in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor, or the performance of particular portions of your virtual infrastructure may not be considered mission critical, and demand the same level of up-time.

In these cases, administrators can include or exclude specific Uptime Infrastructure Monitor Elements from monitoring. Exclusions can be made on a per-VM basis, or by a logical grouping at the VMware vSphere level (e.g., by cluster).

Any VMware vCenter component is by default represented in My Infrastructure as either a known host or a known VM, and is grouped as such in the inventory. (By default, the My Inventory group names are Discovered Hosts and Discovered VM Hosts ). When Elements are ignored, they are removed from My Infrastructure. If new hosts or VMs are discovered during vSync, they are added to the appropriate My Infrastructure group.

For more information, see Managing vCenter Inventories in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor.

vSphere Components and Topological Dependencies

When a VMware vCenter server is added to Uptime Infrastructure Monitor, the hierarchical structure of its components is retained (and used in My Infrastructure ). Uptime Infrastructure Monitor observes particular monitoring rules to these existing VMware vSphere topologies that supplement the behavior of physical topologies that are defined in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor. (See Topological Dependencies for more information.)

When you define a physical topology or VMware vSphere topology in a Topological Dependency, the following behaviors are commonly observed:

• if a topological parent is experiencing downtime, the child Elements in the topology will share the status (i.e., an Element's dependencies will automatically switch to its status)
• an outage with an Element, whether actual or topological, will initiate a host check on its parent (e.g., a service monitor and its host, or a host and its topological parent)

However, there are behaviors unique to Topological Dependencies based on a VMware vSphere topology:

• as VMs migrate, their links to their ESX hosts is maintained
• Uptime Infrastructure Monitor will be aware of power states in the virtual infrastructure, such that parent Elements that are powered down will not spawn alerts with its child Elements (e.g., all of a VMware vCenter servers many ESX servers and VMs)