How would you use the new Comtrade Management Pack for Nutanix?

To bring Nutanix appliance monitoring into standard IT processes, Comtrade launched SCOM Management Pack for Nutanix that gives users comprehensive monitoring, intuitive dashboards, application awareness and automatic notification and remediation.

The Nutanix MP helps increase visibility into Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and discover applications with Comtrade SCOM Management Pack. This new plug-in monitoring solution offers topology discovery, root cause analysis and proactive alerting for nodes, clusters, virtual machines (VMs), storage, data protection and replication performance.

Nutanix MP helps IT teams strength their capabilities in six important ways

Free storage in storage pool is low

Performance of applications running in the Nutanix cluster can be affected by a low free space in a storage pool dedicated for the cluster. The storage pool may have been appropriate when initially configured, but time and workload changes can impact the storage availability. Low free space on a Nutanix cluster pool can be quickly identified by looking at Comtrade Nutanix MP “Storage Overview” dashboard. When storage pool free space is low, an alert is raised. IT can then follow resolution steps in the alert description to assign more storage for the Nutanix cluster to prevent application performance bottlenecks.

Rank top VMs by CPU usage, memory usage, etc.

Cluster performance and health are affected when VMs within the cluster are consuming too many resources. High resource utilization may mean that not all users are being served in a reasonable timeframe. This situation can cause end user frustration or slow down your business. These issues can be quickly identified with “Overview VMs” dashboard, as part of Comtrade’s Nutanix MP, where the VMs can be displayed by top CPU usage, top memory usage, top storage utilization, etc. They can also use the VMs performance views to check performance trends. IT can then work with virtual machine owners and administrators of applications running on them, to assess possible solutions.

Rank top clusters by CPU usage, memory usage, least free space, etc.

If VMs on the Nutanix cluster are consuming too many resources, a cluster’s overall performance and the performance of applications running on it are affected, which can impact lots of users or many different parts of the business. With insight into available resources, every user or process has the resources needed to perform optimally. In such scenarios, IT can quickly identify issues by looking at the “Top Clusters” dashboard provided by Comtrade’s Nutanix MP, where they can quickly view clusters by top CPU usage, memory usage, least free space and more. Cluster performance graphs can also be used to gain visibility into performance trends. Nutanix admins can free up resources by migrating some of the VMs from overloaded clusters to avoid performance bottlenecks for applications hosted on the VMs.

Detect business critical applications running on Nutanix

Knowing which critical business applications are running within a cluster helps IT admins understand the roles of each VM and the resources consumed. If a set of VMs is consuming too many resources, admins can identify which application is running on the set of servers to know what impact it will have on the business. By using Nutanix MP from Comtrade, IT can quickly identify related VMs and their roles by looking into application dashboard, which groups related VMs together.

Assure high availability of business critical applications

Monitoring replication for protection domain is key to the service’s high availability. Having an up-to-date replica of the protection domain will ensure optimal service and reference any alerts that occur in relation to it. IT teams can quickly identify any of the replication issues by looking at “Overview Data Protection Dashboard,” “Protection Domains Table” or “Data Protection Topology,” where the affected protection domain’s status changes to unhealthy whenever an alert is raised. With the Comtrade MP for Nutanix, IT teams can ensure that business critical applications are always highly available.

Know when Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) is down

Nutanix infrastructure relies on CVMs, which means if a CVM is down, the Nutanix node also goes down and reduces the Nutanix cluster’s resources. Using the Comtrade Nutanix MP, IT can immediately identify when a CVM is down because they receive an alert with detailed information about the issue and possible resolution steps. The issue can also be identified by looking at “Table Controller VMs” and “Hardware Diagram,” where CVM machine statuses are listed.

If you are interested in increasing the manageability of your Nutanix environment sign up for 45-day fully functional free trial.