vROps used to have application monitoring in earlier versions. Before version 7, this was monitored by Epops (End Point Operations Management Agent) agents, from version 7 this changed to a new open source solution based on Telegraf.
To use the Telegraf clients to monitor your system you need the Application RCs and the activation of the OS and application management packs which were covered in section 4.
Once this is done you can move to the next step of monitoring Platform and applications. This is what I want to go over in this section. The Telegraf agent can be handled from inside vROps. You can install/upgrade/uninstall, start and stop the service etc from
Before we start on the configuration in vROps I want to just go over where you can see the current supported platform versions and also what is required for the agents for the OS/Applications you want to monitor.
You can find a list of supported platforms in the VMware documentation, the list is here. You can find a list of supported applications and versions here. Additionally for some applications there are some extra steps to be performed. These can be found here.
From the Monitor Application page you can see what applications are supported also. But not the versions. (Home –> Manage Applications –> Monitor Applications)
For Linux Windows there are some requirements for the user account used to mange the agents. Rather than going over them I preferred to link to the VMware page for this.
For me, I will use the root account on linux in this part. Simply because it is easier, for demonstration purposes. For Windows I will use a service account I created in AD and gave administrative access.
From the Home tab go to Manage Applications –> Monitor Applications and click on manage agents. This takes you to Administration –> Inventory and then the Manage Agents tab. You will see a list of all your VMs and if you have done nothing prior here, you will see that the agent is not installed on any of them.
Next step is to highlight a Linux agent and install the agent. in my case aoctest99. Clicking on the vm highlights it and I can select to install the agent from the button at the top as seen below.
It will ask you which one of two options you want to use. I will in this case use option 1 because there is only one VM here. So option one is if you have a lot of machines with the same username and password. Option two will give you the option to use different passwords. vROps will give you an csv where you can fill in the information, and upload it again and vROps will then use the csv file for the various computers.
Press next, and fill in the username and password. vROps can also automatically create the runtime for you with the required permission settings if you leave the box checked.
Click next. It gives you a summary and you click on “Install Agent”. VROps goes away and performs its task.
Back at the menu you will see last operation status is “Installation in progress.
After a few minutes the agent should be finished installing. If you have installed any applications on it that are supported, a few minutes later they should also be showing up under the “Services discovered/configured” column in the middle.
You can install an agent by click on the button next to the install button and if required later you can upgrade the agents by the button next to the uninstall button. The green button is for starting the service and the red button is for stopping the service.
For Windows it is installation on multiple vms so I did a filter for Operating systems and Windows and marked the VMs.
CLicking on the Install agent button gets us going. Lets try the second option this time.
The second options gives us the csv file under “Download Template”
You get a list with each selected machine and the information, like this:
After you fill in each line you then need to browse and upload the file again before clicking next. Failing to do this will result in an error. You get a success window. Click OK.
You then get a list of the systems again and then click on “Install Agent” and let things happen.
Again you get a list of the machines with the status:
Afterwards you should have the agents installed and service discovered after a little while.
On Windows you should have two services like this:
The files on Windows are downloaded to C:\Vmware\UCP\downloads\
If for some reason the agent does not install from the vROps interface you can run the installation manually from the CLI (with Admin privileges). I had this on two of my DCs where the agent was only downloaded. I had some failures on other hosts, so lets check what happened. By the way, You can see that two of the DCs already have detected services here.
So for the other two DCs lets run the process manually since the agents have been downloaded.
Run the following command: cmd /c uaf-bootstrap-launcher.bat > uaf_bootstrap.log 2>&1
Confirm the installation from the uaf_bootstrap.log (located in same folder) and that the agent status and last operation from vROps agent page.
You can also run a get-service ucp* to check if the services are installed.
So that fixed the two domain controllers. What about the rest. Actually it was my fault for assigning the rights incorrectly. I went in for the other 6 machines and added the user to the local admin group and ran the job again. In the other cases I did some more troubleshooting (disable UAC, run as local admin, run as domain admin) All without any joy. In the end I logged in as a local administrator and ran it this way. This was after going through this kb (which is for vROps 7.5). In the end here is how it looks:
Agents page:
And on the Home page under Monitor Applications:
That’s all for now. Later I hope to dive in a bit deeper for the monitoring of the apps.
P.S. for the agent upgrade, this is described in Part 2 of the vROps upgrade, which you can find here.