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Steph_Zylstra's avatar
Steph_Zylstra
8 years ago

Group VM instances in VMware by VDC/Resource Pool

I would love to see the "ESX VM" datasource allow grouping its instances by the VDC/Resource Pool in which each VM is contained.

Use case: Each VDC in our infrastructure may have different alerting rules. We have many VDCs and most of these VDCs are available directly to customers through vcloud director, allowing them to create their own VMs using names over which we have no control (so we can't use the automated name filters to group them). Customers may add a new VM at any time within their own VDC and they have the option to expand out at will without notifying us. Currently, grouping VMs by their VDC in LogicMonitor is a manual process which gets outdated everytime a new VM is created - which is at least daily.

As a workaround, if the LogicMonitor APIs allowed a way to create instance groups and add instances to those groups, we could script this out and just add new VMs into the appropriate groups as the scripts detect that they have been added into the environment, however, it appears that this functionality doesn't exist in the API either.

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  • Steph_Zylstra's avatar
    Steph_Zylstra
    8 years ago

    This would help staff to find/troubleshoot relevent issues (i.e. making sure that the VM instance they are looking at is the one for the customer in question, not a similarly-named one for another customer), and would also assist in located relevant instances as well as comparing usage by customer and/or by service type.

    All our VMs are currently grouped within VDCs in our vcenter environment, and this is how employees are used to finding particular VMs.

  • Sarah_Terry's avatar
    Sarah_Terry
    Icon for Product Manager rankProduct Manager
    8 years ago

    We will look into allowing ESX instance grouping by VDC/Resource Pool.  Re grouping via the API, we are currently publishing the first version of our REST API & will be adding this functionality in the next couple of months.

  • Steph_Zylstra's avatar
    Steph_Zylstra
    8 years ago
    On 8/26/2016 at 4:10 AM, Sarah Terry said:

    We will look into allowing ESX instance grouping by VDC/Resource Pool.  Re grouping via the API, we are currently publishing the first version of our REST API & will be adding this functionality in the next couple of months.

     

    Hi Sarah,

    Has there been any update on either allowing this functionality natively and/or using the API to group instances? This is becoming quite urgent for us.

  • Sarah_Terry's avatar
    Sarah_Terry
    Icon for Product Manager rankProduct Manager
    8 years ago

    We're thinking of adding an option to group based on instance level properties, which would work for your use case (where resource pool would be an instance level property of the ESX instances) - but this is still in the works.  API functionality related to instance grouping will be published in v82 (late October).  For an immediate workaround, you could use our Regular Expression automatic grouping method (which may require that you change how instances are named). 

  • Steph_Zylstra's avatar
    Steph_Zylstra
    8 years ago

    Thanks Sarah for the update.

    Unfortunately, as I said on my original post, renaming VMs is not an option.

  • Steph_Zylstra's avatar
    Steph_Zylstra
    8 years ago
    On 9/23/2016 at 2:27 AM, Sarah Terry said:

    We're thinking of adding an option to group based on instance level properties, which would work for your use case (where resource pool would be an instance level property of the ESX instances) - but this is still in the works.  API functionality related to instance grouping will be published in v82 (late October).  For an immediate workaround, you could use our Regular Expression automatic grouping method (which may require that you change how instances are named). 

     

    Hi Sarah,

    It's now February and we're about to get v85. I still don't see resource pool as an instance level property - when is this coming?

    Thanks!

  • Mike_Rodrigues's avatar
    Mike_Rodrigues
    Icon for Product Manager rankProduct Manager
    8 years ago

    Hi Steph,

    We'll be releasing updates to "ESX VM-" and "ESX VM Snapshots-" in the next few weeks. They include the resource pool name as an instance level property that you can use for automatic instance grouping.

    -Michael

  • Mike_Rodrigues's avatar
    Mike_Rodrigues
    Icon for Product Manager rankProduct Manager
    8 years ago

    @Steph Zylstra I wanted to let you know that the updated ESX datasources (ESX VM-, ESX VM Snapshots-, and ESX_VM_Status) are now available from the repository.

    Active Discovery will still return the same WILDVALUE and WILDALIAS as the predecessors, so historical data will not be lost upon update.

    On your vCenter devices, you can optionally add set esx.tags to "true" and pull vSphere tags in as ILPs.

    You'll also notice that the Resource Pool is available with the ILP auto.resource_pool.


    Let us know what you think!

    -Michael


     

  • Steph_Zylstra's avatar
    Steph_Zylstra
    8 years ago

    @Michael Rodrigues Thanks for that! 

    If I try to add from repository, ESX VM is coming up as "New" instead of "Show Diff" I also can't see anywhere what properties are exposed by this. Is this expected behaviour, and if so is there a way I can audit the differences to decide if I need Tom's community one as well as the LogicMonitor one?

     

    Thanks again!