Sending DSM 9.0 metrics to Prometheus & Grafana

Following on from my previous post on how to send VMware Data Services Manager (DSM) 9.0 metrics to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations, I now want to show how it is also possible to send the DSM database metrics to Prometheus. In this post, I will demonstrate how to ship metrics to Prometheus, and of course, use Prometheus as a data source for Grafana to build a sample dashboard. To make things a bit simpler for myself, I am going to use Helm to deploy both Prometheus and Grafana on my vanilla Kubernetes (K8s) cluster. The Prometheus and Grafana deployments…

Sending DSM 9.0 metrics to VCF Operations

In the DSM 9.0 Release Notes, the following item about metrics is listed in the What’s New section: You can use the VMware Data Services Manager API to publish PostgreSQL and MySQL metrics to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 (VCF) Operations and Prometheus [..] enabling better visibility, alerting, and performance management for all databases that VMware Data Services manages. In this post, I will show how to configure DSM 9.0 to send Postgres and MySQL database metrics to VCF 9.0 Operations. While this process is rather manual in VCF 9.0, we plan to significantly improve this overall experience for users going forward.…

Creating firewall rules in NSX to control client access to DSM provisioned databases

This post began as a request from one of our customers. They wanted to know how one would go about allowing a select set of clients access a select set of databases provisioned by Data Services Manager, whilst simultaneously preventing access to other databases. I put my head together with my DSM buddy Thomas and came up with the following solution. We thought it interesting enough to share in a blog post, but we may also put this into the official DSM docs as well. Whilst this is using VCF 9.0 and new constructs such as VPCs and VPC subnets,…

Why choose Data Services Manager as your on-premises DBaaS?

Now that Data Services Manager 9.0 has been officially announced, more and more customers are beginning to realise what this add-on to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can do for their respective organizations who are looking for an on-premises database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solution. Simultaneously, I’ve received a number of queries asking me to articulate the benefits of DSM. Although DSM has been around for a number of years now, it would appear that the VCF 9.0 launch has brought it to the attention of more of our customers. In this post, I will attempt to highlight the overall benefits of DSM. I…

Data Services Manager 9.0 with VCF 9.0 and VCF Automation

The purpose of this post is to highlight the latest integration between Data Services Manager (DSM) version 9.0 and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) version 9.0. Namely, I want to show how DSM is now tightly coupled into VCF Automation (VCFA), providing multi-tenancy and allowing different tenants in different organisations to provision database and data services via DSM. In this post, I will describe the configuration steps which connects DSM and VCFA, as well as showing how a tenant in a VCFA organization can deploy a Postgres database. There are more great things to come as we integrate even more tightly,…

Microsoft SQL Server now tech preview in Data Services Manager 9.0

As I highlighted in my previous post, we are delighted to announce that Microsoft SQL Server is now a technical preview in Data Services Manager version 9.0. This is one of the most requested data services that customers have been asking for. We have heard requests for MS SQL Server at various DSM events held over the past year or so. It’s great to finally have this as a service we can offer our customers, not just the day 0 provisioning aspect, but also the various day 2 operations including backup & restore, patching, certificate management, cloning, monitoring, etc, as…