Data Services Manager (DSM) 2.0 continues to provides detailed monitoring and alerting, similar to what was available in DSM version 1.x. It continues to offer both email alerting as well as webhook integration to send notifications to Slack and ServiceNow. In this post, we will look at some of the changes in the User Interface for configuring webhooks. For the purposes of this post, we will examine the configuration of a webhook to send notifications to Slack. The creation of the webhook itself is identical to how it was configured in version 1.x, so there is no point in discussing…
Continuing on with my series of blog posts which examine the new features and functionality of VMware Data Services Manager version 2.0, this post will look at some of the vertical scaling (scale up) and horizontal scaling (scale out) in DSM 2.0. We start with a standalone PostgreSQL database deployment, and then focus on the scale out initially by changing the topology from a single node to a three node database cluster. In a standalone Postgres database, the Primary role and the Monitor role exist as separate Pods on the same VM. By changing the topology, the Primary and Monitor…
At VMware Explore 2023 in Barcelona, we made a big announcement about VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) version 2.0. In the upcoming series of blog posts, I will introduce you to the new features of DSM version 2.0. One major shift in focus is that DSM 2.0 is squarely aimed at the vSphere Administrator, allowing them to control which resources are consumed by the various data services deployed via Data Services Manager. Thus, in this first post, we will primarily focus on an integral feature of DSM 2.0 called Infrastructure Policies. Note: DSM version 2.0 is not yet generally available.…
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.…