Overview of VMware Engine monitoring

This document provides an overview of the different methods for monitoring Google Cloud VMware Engine private clouds.

Monitoring your VMware Engine private clouds helps you operate your environment efficiently, troubleshoot errors, and optimize performance, both at the project level (all private clouds within a project) and for individual private clouds.

Monitor VMware Engine in your project

You can use logs to receive a notification every time a node or VMware component in your private cloud fails, as well as when the issue is resolved.

The following table lists the available logs for VMware Engine and the severity of the reported events:

VMware component Failure notification Resolution notification
VMware Engine node ALERT NOTICE
VMware vCenter CRITICAL NOTICE
VMware NSX Data Center CRITICAL NOTICE
VMware HCX CRITICAL NOTICE

You can access logs for VMware Engine in the following ways:

  • In Logs Explorer, by using the following log name:

    • projects/PROJECT_ID/logs/vmwareengine.googleapis.com%2Falerts

  • In the Google Cloud console, by going to the Dashboard page.

For more information about receiving notifications using logs, see Configure log-based alerting policies in the Google Cloud Observability documentation.

Monitor VMware Engine private clouds

You can choose Cloud Monitoring or a third-party tool mentioned in this section to monitor your VMware Engine private clouds. This section uses a decision-making flow to help you choose the method that best suits your needs. If you prefer a visual guide, see Decision tree in this document.

To choose a method to monitor your private cloud, consider the following questions:

  1. Do you want to centralize infrastructure logs from VMware components and use an external log monitoring system?

  2. Do you want infrastructure and workload monitoring, as well as proactive issue detection and troubleshooting recommendations?

  3. Do you want to track resource usage, set alerts, and receive notifications about virtual machine (VM) instance events using a Google Cloud product?

Forward syslog messages to a remote server

VMware Engine lets you forward syslog messages generated by your VMware environment to a remote syslog server. This lets you centralize your log data so that you can monitor and analyze your infrastructure.

For more information, see Forwarding syslog messages to a remote server.

Identify and fix issues with VMware Aria Operations

VMware Aria Operations is a VMware product that provides detailed insights into your VMware vCenter environments. VMware Aria Operations uses advanced analytics to help you identify issues, forecast usage, and recommend corrective actions to ensure optimal performance, availability, and efficiency in your virtual infrastructure.

For more information, see Configuring VMware Aria Operations.

View performance data or set alerts with Monitoring

You can use Cloud Monitoring to monitor performance data, as well as set alerts for specific events or errors, within your private clouds.

If you want to use Monitoring in your private clouds, you must first forward metrics from your private clouds by defining collectors, sources, and destinations in BindPlane. For more information, see Setting up Monitoring with a standalone agent.

To monitor your private clouds, you can use one or both of the following Monitoring features described in this document:

  • To view a high-level overview of key resources, or view a more focused view of the usage of your resources, use Monitoring dashboards.

  • To receive an alert every time a specific event happens in your private clouds, use Monitoring alerts.

Use Monitoring dashboards

Monitoring dashboards help you monitor the performance of your infrastructure by aggregating information from multiple standalone agent sources. If you want to view the analytics of your private clouds with minimal setup and configuration, then use the predefined dashboards that Monitoring automatically installs for the resources in your project. Otherwise, if you want to view analytics from multiple sources or create a customized view of your infrastructure performance, use custom dashboards.

For more information, see Dashboards overview in the Monitoring documentation.

Use Monitoring alerts

Monitoring alerts let you use metrics from your standalone agent integration to trigger a notification based on custom thresholds or incidents. For example, you can set up Monitoring to send you an email every time a VM is created in your private cloud.

For more information, see Alerting overview in the Monitoring documentation.

Monitor your environment with vCenter monitoring tools

vCenter gives you a comprehensive suite of tools to monitor and troubleshoot your VMware environment. You can use vCenter monitoring tools to gain insight into the performance, health, and capacity of your private clouds, as well as to set alerts using log files.

For more information, see About vSphere Monitoring and Performance in the VMware documentation.

Decision tree

The following diagram guides you through the factors to consider when deciding your monitoring method for your VMware Engine private clouds:

Decision tree to choose a monitoring method for your private clouds.