vCOps and In-Guest agents

[TheVMinator]

Currently I am looking at all information in vCOps based on what it has pulled from vCenter.  There are no custom adapters configured to pull information in from inside the Guest OS.

How important is it when baselining an application to be able to see inside the guest OS from the perspective of an agent that runs on the OS, and pull that info into vCOps?

What are the advantages and drawbacks of using an in-guest agent to supplement the information I see in vCOPs and pull that info into vCOPs?

Which solutions for in-guest agents that can integrate with vCOps provide the most information and is there a comparison of them (i.e. vFabric Hyperic vs. competition)?

[mark_j]

If you're going to create an application performance profile or baseline, you need the GuestOS specifics in many situations. You need the OS information in addition to application-process information (java, sql, etc), to name a couple.

The advantage to having Guest-level metrics is that to you have more visibility in to your workload. Without, you're just observing the virtual machine behavior - which can be satisfactory or unsatisfactory depending on the type of workload you're trying to profile.

I usually see Hyperic and SCOM. They both get you guest-level stats, but Hyperic integrates a little better with the Web Client, agent deployment/management, suite bundle licensing, and vCOps features OOTB (native relationships creation, etc).

[TheVMinator]

Thanks.  Specifically does Hyperic (or another tool that vCOPs can pull data from) measure application response time?  Specifically how long the application is taking to respond and not just a specific CPU, RAM, networking or storage metric?  I don't mean latency in terms of network round trip time or storage array response time, but application response time.

How do I get ART data into vCOps or can I with Hyperic?

[mark_j]

If that level of app monitoring isn't included OOTB for a specific application with hyperic, you can always script out different tests that will return information to the Hyperic agents, which will ultimately be collected by vCOps in the form of a metric.