DSM 9.0.1 – VCF Operations 9.0.1 Integration Improvements

We have made significant improvements to the integration between Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0.1 and VCF Operations 9.0.1. In version 9.0, the setup to send metrics from DSM to VCF Ops was a little complex, as per this earlier blog post on the subject. In DSM v9.0.1, we’ve added the majority of the steps into the DSM UI to make it much easier and much more straight to configure. Let’s see how in this post.

First, login to the DSM UI as a DSM Administrator. Navigate to the Settings menu on the left hand side. Here you will find the Metrics Forwarding tab. Select that tab to begin the setup.

Click on the “Configure Metrics Forwarding” button, and begin to populate details regarding the VCF Operations environment, in particular the Cloud Proxy component. A cloud proxy collects data from the end-point environment and uploads it to VCF Operations. Set the type to VCF Operations, then set the URL to be “https://<fqdn-of-cloud-proxy>:8443/opensource/default/metric“. Client Certificate Authentication must be used to connect to VCF Operations. To use this method, you will need to retrieve the certificate and private key from the cloud proxy. This is currently only possible via the API. See my previous 9.0 VCF Ops integration post for details on how to retrieve this information. It is not necessary to provide a “Basic Auth” username and password when using Client Certificate Authentication.

Unless you have already added the Cloud Proxy Certificate Authority to the DSM Trusted Root Certificates, you cannot enable Skip CA Certificate Verification. If you do not skip the CA Certificate Verification, you will be prompted to accept the Certificate Authority (CA) when it is presented to you during the configuration. The Custom Headers sections is for customers who want to add them to help routing, authentication, traceability, etc. Otherwise this field, which is optional, can be left blank. Similarly, Timeout in seconds should be fine at the default value of 5, but this is tuneable.

Review the settings. Click Configure. If everything is configured correctly, then the following Ready status should be observed in the Metrics Forwarding view:

We can now turn our attention to viewing those metrics in VCF Operations. After approximately 15 minutes, metrics from DSM should be flowing into VCF Operations (the existing DSM databases will need to restart to redirect their metrics to the VCF Operations endpoint). In VCF Operations UI, do a search on the keyword “dsm” to find the metrics. Look for the dsmpostgres_GENERIC for Postgres database or dsmmysql_Generic for MySQL databases. These are the objects with the actual actual metrics:

Drilling into these objects by clicking on them, you can locate the metrics that are being sent via the DSM Postgres database:

You can now proceed with building dashboards to highlight the metrics from your database that you are most interested in. This is a much improved user experience than what we had in version 9.0. Thanks for reading this far. Hope you find this information useful. You can find all my DSM related posts at this link.