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Brief product description

BVQ for VMware integrates VMware into the BVQ end-to-end infrastructure for automated analysis, monitoring, reporting and comprehensive problem and performance analysis. This is the starting point for answers to questions about configuration and best practice, performance, and capacity of the system.

BVQ has an end-to-end view that monitors VMware in the surrounding infrastructure. With this BVQ can find answers to questions such as: is VMware affected by problems in storage or does VMware load on single VMs overload other systems



BVQ for VMware is part of the BVQ product.
A more detailed description of the BVQ product can be found here:
BVQ Base Product and BVQ spec sheet



Supported VMware vSphere products

BVQ for VMware supports all vSphere storage topologies such as vSAN and classic external storage connected via SAN or NFS

VMware version

BVQ support

BVQ version

Comment

<5.0

not supported



5.0

supported

2.8 → current


5.1supported2.8 → current
5.5supported3.4 → current
6.0supported3.5.4 → current
6.5supported5.0 → current
6.7supported6.0 → current
7.0supported6.1.4 → current


BVQ for VMware licensing

BVQ for VMware is licensed by the number of Virtual machines (VMs) running in the environment. We offer license packs of 25 VMs (sum of VMs in the environment, divided by 25 = number of packs to license). Please contact your SVA sales representative for pricing information.
Details here: License information

BVQ for VMware data gathering

BVQ collects data from the VMware vSphere environment for visualization and analyzing purposes. The collected information consists of capacity, topology, performance and event data. BVQ scan the VMware vSphere environment using the official VMware API provided by a vCenter appliance. The connection between BVQ & VMware vSpehere vCenter is secured via HTTPS, so no data is sent without encryption. The collected data is stored in the authentication protected BVQ database.

Scan interval for BVQ for VMware is 20 seconds

More base information about BVQ for VMware

We have a lot of valuable information in our BVQ Release Notes.
On the subject of BVQ for VMware you will find more interesting information here, some of which have the same content as this document.

 

BVQ for VMware use cases


Typical use cases for VMware

  • How healthy are my VMware systems? Do I have risks, do I exceed limit values?
  • How do my VMware systems interact with the infrastructure? Are memories or networks overloaded and cause problems e.g. at application level?
  • Do individual VMs overload the infrastructure and thereby affect other VMs?
  • Which performance bottlenecks slow down a VM?
  • Are there CPU oversubscription problems in my hosts?
  • Which VMs can I reclaim CPUs and memory from?
  • Will resyncs in the disk groups affect vSAN performance?
  • How can I prove a problem is inside or outside VMware?

General BVQ Use cases

BVQ was developed for the monitoring, reporting and problem analysis of a complete infrastructures.
ITSM systems use BVQ because it has access to all data and is strong in communication. This reduces the development times and costs for connecting and maintaining these systems.

General application scenarios:
  • Fully automated infrastructure analysis
    BVQ continuously monitors all connected systems and reports deviations and problems. Violations of best practice, configuration rules or self-defined threshold values are recognized and reported immediately.     The results are displayed on just one screen using the BVQ System Health map. BVQ is delivered with a large number of tests that only need to be switched on.
     
  • Easy-to-use monitoring and efficient reporting
    BVQ has a browser interface for monitoring and reporting.There are reports or dashboards for all platforms that can be used immediately. So you can start working immediately and achieve important results.     
     
  • Deep problem analysis with the BVQ GUI
    If you find performance bottlenecks in monitoring or alerting that are not easy to explain, use the BVQ Analysis GUI to start a deeper root cause analysis. The BVQ Analysis GUI is well prepared for this task because it allows you to quickly discover the problem areas and easily jump between the layers of one or more systems. Drill-downs allow the analyst to go deeper and deeper to find a problem causer. Drill-ups help him to visualize the effects of a problem. End-to-end analysis makes it easy to determine if problems are due to misbehavior in the system itself or to other systems. One of the great strengths of the BVQ Analysis GUI is that it displays the results of many objects simultaneously on a single chart to speed up the analysis process. The results of several 100 or 1000 objects can be visualized in seconds to find outliers. Another great strength of the GUI analysis is that it automatically keeps track of the topology so that drill-downs and drill-ups do not give false results. With this feature, you can also easily switch between systems, such as VMware to the storage or the SAN network to start an end-to-end analysis.

  • BVQ connect module for the ITSM infrastructure connection
    The REST interface allows to use the BVQ results in applications like Splunk, Elastic, ServiceNow, Power BI or SAP BI and many more. The REST interface is easy to use and dramatically reduces the development effort and data volumes in the connected systems by providing results in tabular form or as chat data. The full strength of BVQ can be used, such as End-to-end relations, all metrics, means or peak values or aggregations at all levels.


Tools and definitions included in the scope of delivery

BVQ comes with many tools and pre-defined definitions so you can get started right after the installation. These tools include analysis favorites, monitoring dashboards, reports and prepared alert templates, and probes for the Systems Health map.

Systems Health map support and alerting templates for VMware

The BVQ Systems Health Map is an automatic system analysis, combined with a very simple and understandable presentation of the results.
These results are based on a large number of system tests already included in the delivery of BVQ.

The BVQ Systems Health Map is integrated in the BVQ Server in the overview page of the entire BVQ system and can be accessed via a web interface

It collects the results of all system tests and, depending on their status, displays red, green or yellow. Optimization potentials are displayed in blue.
The results are topologically aggregated so that one can derive an overall statement about the system and its components via the individual statements.


Pict.: Image section from the BVQ Systems Health Map.

 

The Systems Health Map is interactive and can be set with simple mouse clicks to exactly the level you are interested in.
In another presentation the Systems Health Map is not organized topologically but thematically. This is especially helpful if you want to group organizational units or risk priorities.
The Systems Health Map is currently shipped with a large number of prepared probes and can be extended with specialized, custom-tailored alerts.

The System Health map is a constantly updated analysis of the overall system and can be used by the administrator as a daily task list to constantly improve the system and eliminate risks.
But one can also see the Systems Health Map as an attractive representation of a wallboard (monitor on the wall of the data center) where you can see at a glance how good the current system status of the monitored IT infrastructure is.

The Systems health map can be easily configured and put into operation. Alerts delivered with the Systems Health Map can be toggled on or off with a button or customized.
included best practice tests, typically have no additional parameters where the ranges of performance limit can easily be customized in tabular form.

 


Pict.: The configuration of the Systems Health Map is very clear and simple.
The included system tests are turned on or off. The parametrization is carried out in a table.


In addition occurring System Health map statuses can be sent as notification or written in freely definable log files. Access via REST interface allows systems such as ServiceNow, Nagios, ELK, Kibana, Splunk, ... to actively use the System Health Map data.

System Alerts for the BVQ systems health map

In total, more than 250 alerts are available for the Systems Health map today. These alerts are fully defined and can still be adjusted using parameters in the Predefined alert section of the BVQ server
The Systems Health map for this platform includes alerts from the following areas:

  • System Limits
  • System limits
  • Configuration
  • Capacity
  • Performance
  • Status

Alerting templates to create detailed alerts

More detailed alerting can be set up via alerting templates or using the free definition of alerts.
The alerting templates are very easy to use and are filled out using dialogue system. With these templates you can tailor alerts in many ways to the current environment.
For more special and complex alerts use the advanced editor in the custom rules area of the BVQ Server. The SVA Service Team can support you with creating complex alerts.

Monitoring for VMware

BVQ is delivered with a monitoring interface to the software tool Grafana, which is already used in many companies today for a variety of monitoring tasks.

The interface is very powerful and allows access to all measured values in different groupings.


Pict. : BVQ monitoring via a browser. BVQ uses the very common Grafana for the Monitoring Interface.
This makes it very easy to operate BVQ monitoring in conjunction with existing monitoring.


Grafana is part of the BVQ Installation process and can be installed optionally. For all layers and platforms pre-prepared dashboards are delivered with the installation and Grafana .

It is always possible to create your own dashboards. The implementation is clearly displayed in our online documentation.

We are available for targeted training according to your requirements. Special dashboards can be created by us as a service measure.

Monitoring dashboards are always updated and extended.
Starting with the Entry Edition, you can design your own dashboards or adapt the existing dashboards.


  • Available dashboards
     

    VMware - All vCenter host overview

    Use this dashboard for monitoring to see critical deviations and developments in vCenters.

    VMware - Cluster performance overview

    This dashboard gives a general overview for VMware clusters hosts & VMs and can also be used to analyze deeper into operation of VMs and the connection to storage used in data stores

    VMware - Host detail

    The host detail dashboard gives you the opportunity to bring several selected hosts into a monitoring environment so that, for example, employees who do not work so close to BVQ can monitor their hosts themselves.

    VMware - VM detail

    The VM detail dashboard gives you the opportunity to bring several selected hosts into a monitoring environment so that, for example, employees who do not work so close to BVQ can monitor their VMs themselves.


Reporting for VMware

BVQ Reporting uses templates that can be easily assembled from existing and newly created elements.

This means you can quickly implement general and very specific reporting requirements.


Pict.: Two examples of reports that were generated with different methods.
Reporting via BVQ Reporting engine and via external data access through Excel.

 

These reports can be created in the background as an HTML or PDF file. Reports can be sent by mail after creation, or you can use an HTML link that refers to the latest report at any time.
With these you can easily incorporate reporting into the corporate communication.

BVQ ships with prepared reports for Storage, SAN and VMware. The creation of own reports is possible and explained in our online documentation.

There is also the possibility of training or creating special reports as a service.


Reports are always updated and extended.
Starting with the Entry Edition, you can design your own reports or adapt the existing reports.


  • Available reports
     

    VMware capacity overview report

    Capacity report for VMware vCenters, Clusters, Hosts and Virtual Machines reporting their current allocatable, allocated, virtual, used and free capacities and the Virtual Machine power states.


Analytic favorites for VMware

For the performance and problem analysis, a system expert can use the BVQ Expert GUI, which is deliberately delivered as a separate application so that the user of monitoring, reporting or Systems Health map is not confronted with the higher complexity of an analysis tool.

The Expert GUI provides access to a very large number of metrics that can be used in various combinations and hierarchies. Special features of this GUI are an extremely high level of interactivity and performance in the analysis analysis and an extremely fast representation of large series of measurements.

For example, the GUI allows you to render 1000s of volumes or VMs on a chart in a very short time.
This is very important because it allows you to spot outliers in no time and the speed of analysis is high.


Pict.: The analysis GUI offers prepared analysis dashboards with which most problem cases can be solved directly.

 

 A goal in the BVQ analysis is to make problems visible at a glance. To achieve this special analysis dashboards have been developed, which are included in the scope of delivery. These dashboards cover most problem cases and are clearly documented in the product.

Interactivity is a top priority in the BVQ Expert GUI. It is always possible to branch from a measured value to the entire topology via drill down or drill up. BVQ takes the lead here and assists the user when traveling through the data, in the form, that correct objects are always selected automatically.
This speeds up the work of the analyst and reduces potential errors and misinterpretations.

In the case of multiple platforms or infrastructure layers, BVQ enables seamless movement between the worlds. This makes very complex analyzes, such as to visualize the load of individual storage volumes through operations in VMs, at the push of a button (see section True End to End Analysis)

During installation, you are introduced into the use of the analysis GUI. In-depth analysis training can be added on demand.

Analyzes can become very complex. For this reason, a special analysis can also be requested as a service of SVA. Typical analyzes are problem analyzes, health checks or planning analyzes.

BVQ comes with a predefined set of favorites for analysis. These favorites can be seen as analysis cooking recipes and they are very well documented in the product.
The way how to use favorites and some of the major favorites are explained in more detail in the BVQ quick start guide.

The favorites tree consists of the areas.

  • General Section: Topology and performance overview
  • Analysis Section: Favorites used from experts for deeper analysis
  • Table View Section: Tables for all objects. These can be used for reporting or the REST interface.


List of included analysis favorites

The analysis favorites are shown here as a list, the details of which can be opened if you are a customer and have access to the detailed BVQ documentation.
Otherwise the names of the analysis favorites are very meaningful and give a good impression of the possible applications