Acquired in October 2018, CloudHealth is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering from VMware, capturing public cloud costs, compliance, and workload performance metrics for analysis and projection uses cases.
VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) has similar capabilities for your private cloud and VMware Cloud datacenters. Mashing up the data under a single UI makes sense, and we can now do that!
There are two management packs for vROps that will do this:
This management pack comes with three dashboards and 25 views. Its adapter pulls data from CloudHealth, allowing the consumer to see all private and public cloud costing data in vROps. This is represented above by the blue arrow.
This management pack pushes cost, usage, and asset inventory from your vROps environment to CloudHealth (represented above by the green arrow). If the consumer is public cloud focused and likes the CloudHealth UI, this management pack will be very helpful. The blog announcing GA of this product can be found here.
In practice, what does this look like? Once downloaded and installed, the management packs will show in Administration - Solutions - Repository - Other Management Packs.
Let's configure the first one, to pull CloudHealth data into vROps.
Click the + sign to add your credentials, you'll need your CloudHealth API key. As you can see, there is proxy support as well.
Additionally, you can include a list of CloudHealth Perspectives to import. For more information on CloudHealth Perspectives go here.
Once done, click VALIDATE CONNECTION.
Now that we are collecting CloudHealth data, let's check out the dashboards, there are three of them.
My CloudHealth instance has AWS and Azure data, the vROps dashboards look like this.
We can also mash up the CloudHealth public cloud data with the vROps private cloud data on a single dashboard showing all cost information. If you like what you see, this dashboard (and views) are available on VMware {code}.
Next, let's use the vROps Integration for CloudHealth management pack to send vSphere private cloud costing data to CloudHealth. After installing the management pack, go to Administration - Solutions - Other Accounts - ADD ACCOUNT. Select the VMware vRealize Operations Integration for CloudHealth tile and you'll be presented with configuration options. Select the + sign in the Credential field and point them to your CloudHealth instance by using the API key (CloudHealth API key documentation found here). Once done, click OK, test the connection, then click ADD to save the adapter instance.
All vCenter accounts in vROps will now be integrated with CloudHealth, making CloudHealth the focal point of your costing platform. This is a perfect use case for cloud administrators that prefer the CloudHealth UI over vROps.
CloudHealth and vROps are powerful platforms from VMware, for more information go here for CloudHealth and here for vROps!
Comments