Before it was VMware Tanzu, it was Pivotal Software, which had two main products: Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and Spring Framework. PCF was Pivotals distribution of the open source Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
Pivotal was formed in 2012, spinning out of EMC and VMware. In 2013, General Electric and Cloud Foundry invested $105M in Pivotal. In 2018, Pivotal raised $555M via an IPO. In December 2019, Pivotal was acquired by VMware. Since then, PCF has been rebranded as the VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS).
There are several ways to monitor TAS: Tanzu Mission Conrol, Tanzu HealthWatch, VMware Wavefront, and VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). This blog will focus on the vRealize True Visibility Suite (vRTVS) Management Pack for TAS, providing the user with visibility into TAS from vROps.
So, how does the TVS Management Pack for TAS collect data? The adapter captures data via three APIs:
TVS Nozzle API - this is the API for the Nozzle connected to the Loggregator Firehose. The Nozzle is a TVS provided construct. The Loggregator Firehose streams all event data from a TAS deployment. The data stream includes events, logs, metrics from applications, and metrics from TAS platform components.
Cloud Controller API - the Cloud Controller centralizes APIs for integration with the TAS platform and its applications. The Cloud Controller itself maintains a database with tables for orgs, spaces, services, user roles, and more.
BOSH Director API - BOSH is a public cloud agnostic tool for release engineering, software deployment, and application lifecycle management. It is comprised of a server (the BOSH Director) and a command line tool. BOSH Director communicates with an Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) platform.
At a high level, this is what it looks like:
Our management pack captures over 700 metrics against 19 different objects: Access, Applications, Application Instances, Availability Zones, BOSH Jobs, Bulletin Board Systems, CC-Bridges, Cloud Controllers, Consuls, Diego Brains, Diego Cells, Doppler Servers, Etc Servers, Foundations, GoRouters, Organizations, Services, Spaces, and Traffic Controllers. Our management pack also includes 6 Dashboards, 13 Reports, and 144 Alerts. Formal documentation for all objects and their relationships can be found here.
Our management pack provides visibility into your TAS environments performance, capacity, and general health. Out of the box dashboards provide insight at six different levels: Applications, Diego Cells and Brains, a general health investigation including all objects, insight into infrastructure supporting TAS, visibility into TAS running on AWS, and finally an overview showing the health of each TAS object.
If you don't find what you need with the default dashboards, you can build custom dashboards to show exactly what you want. For example, you can map Applications and Application Instances down to the infrastructure supporting them. Our adapter will relate Applications to Application Instances, Application Instances to Diego Cells, then Diego Cells to vSphere VMs. Once we've crossed the vSphere edge, VMs can be related to ESXi Hosts and Datastores, which have direct relationships to compute and storage hardware respectively.
Here's a vROps dashboard showing applications, application instances, and their relationships to supporting infrastructure.
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