This is another short video showing the main steps to configure Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations) to monitor databases provisioned via VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). Note that there is a requirement to install True Insight Management Packs for PostgreSQL (and MySQL) with Aria Operations. Thus, there may be a licensing cost associated with this. However, if you are already using Aria Operations as your single pane of glass for monitoring all of your vSphere Infrastructure, then there may be benefits to using the same mechanism to monitor your databases. The purpose here is to demonstrate that provisioning databases via…
VMware Data Services Manager version 1.5 introduces a number of really cool new features. In particular, it includes the ability to deploy a consolidated environment. A consolidated environment is where the functionality of the provider AND the functionality of an agent reside in the same virtual appliance. Previously, customers had to deploy two appliances, even when consuming resources from the vSphere infrastructure where the provider resided. Note that if you wish to consume resources across different vSphere infrastructures which are remote from where the provider is provisioned, then you will still have to deploy an agent VM. However, in this…
A very short video to accompany the blog post I made on the subject of webhooks earlier this week. This video shows how to create a slack app with webhooks enabled. It then shows how to configure VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) v1.5 to send notifications via slack when there is a status change or failure on any of the provisioned databases managed by DSM. This can be an extremely useful mechanism for administrators. Although the video only shows the slack integration steps, it is also possible to use the webhook mechanism to send alerts to ServiceNow, as well as…
In my most recent post, we looked at how to send email alerts via SMTP from VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) v1.5. In this post, we will look at how to send alert notifications using a different method, webhooks. For the purposes of this post, we will examine the steps involved in sending webhook notifications to a slack channel. However, VMware Data Services Manager v1.5 also supports the option to configure webhook notifications to ServiceNow as well as custom webhook configurations for other applications. We will begin this post by first creating a slack application, enabling the web hook features…
Another nice feature of VMware Data Services Manager to help administrators to manage and monitor their fleet of databases is integration with SMTP, the Simple Mail Transport Protocol. This feature allows database owners to receive email notifications when there is an operational issue or failure with their database. In this post, I’ll show you the very simple configuration steps to enable SMTP notifications. I will also show you how to verify that this functionality is behaving as expected by introducing a few failure scenarios to some newly created and existing databases. We are using VMware DSM v1.5 in this post.…
I had an interesting question recently about how best to secure client access to databases that are provisioned via VMware Data Services Manager (DSM). The good news is that we can achieve secure client connections in a single step, directly from the DSM Provider UI. Simply navigate to the database view, and in the Details page, there is a Security section. In the Actions drop-down from this page, we can very simply enable “Client TLS”. What this means is that clients will no longer be able to connect to the database with SSL. Only SSL connections will be allowed. Below…
I had an interesting query earlier this week in relation to PostgreSQL Extensions in VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) v1.5. We do not give out superuser (postgres user) privileges when creating databases via DSM, although it is still possible to find those credentials and access the database with those privileges if necessary. Instead, we focus on the default user that we create when we deploy a database, a user that we have named ‘dbaas’. The query was how should extensions be added to PostgreSQL if ‘dbaas’ is not a superuser? The answer lies in our DSM documentation where we describe…