vFabric Gemfire 7 Monitoring Plugin (Hyperic)

Hyperic plug-in for vFabric Gemfire, manages GemFire Distributed System (DS) and the servers and services it comprises. Recenbtly a new version was released which supports GemFire 7. You can obtain it from the VMware Sulution Exchange link below.

https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store/products/vfabric-gemfire-monitoring-plugin-hyperic

To set GemFire 7 monitoring on Hyperic 50 the steps are as follows

• Download plugin from link above
• If plugin name contains version such as vfgf-plugin-1.0.M1.jar, rename to vfgf-plugin.jar.
• Log in to HQ UI
• Click on Administration
• Click on Plugin Manager
• Click Add/Update Plugins
• Select vfgf-plugin.jar from your filesystem
• Click Ok
• Wait for plugin sync to complete (usually not more than a minute or two)

• Click on Resources
• Click on the Tools menu
• Click on New Platform
• Enter a name for this platform such as "Gemfire 7.0" this name must be unique in HQ Inventory
• Optionally enter Description and Location
• From Platform Type drop down select either "vFabric Gemfire Distributed System 7.x"
• Choose the HQ agent you wish to monitor gemfire from in the Agent Connection drop down. (Note: If the HQ agent will be monitoring GF remotely be sure firewall allows the selected HQ agent to connect to the gemfire agent/locators)
• Enter the IP Address of the GemFire system into IP Address
• Enter a unique name to use in the Fully Qualified Domain Name box. 
• Once done it should look as follows once servers have been picked up and discovered.

• Click OK - This will add the platform to inventory. It still needs to be configured 

• Click on Edit under Configuration Properties under the Inventory tab of the new platform you added
• Enter in the details for the locator(s) and their ports. If there are multiple locators then separate then by a comma.

Finally when done you can save charts to the main dashboard as required.

Hyperic monitoring it's own Oracle repository

Below are some screen shots of what Hyperic 4.6.5 shows in regards to monitoring Oracle 11g RDBMS running on a VM running Redhat 5.7 guest OS. The database it's monitoring is the actual repository database being used by Hyperic itself. The screen shots below show the main dashboard with the Oracle 11g resource overall status as well as viewing a DB writer process for the running instance itself.

The plugin to monitor the Oracle instance is provided as one of the 80+ plugins available with Hyperic out of the box. Once the HQ agent discovers the Oracle instance we are left with simply providing the config to a DB user which has access to all data dictionary tables. The easiest way to do that is to ensure the user you connect wih has the following granted.

grant select any dictionary to {user};

To me given I own the VM / Oracle instance so I will use the system user as the user to query the data dictionary as shown below. Once setup your good to go.

For more information on vFabric Hyperic use the link below.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vfabric5/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.vfabric.hyperic.4.6/vFabric_Hyperic_4.6.html

vFabric hyperic application monitoring

vFabric Hyperic, a stand-alone component of vFabric Application Performance Manager, helps web operations teams monitor the application infrastructure for custom web applications across physical machines, a virtual infrastructure environment, or the cloud. By providing immediate notification of application performance degradation or unavailability, Hyperic enables system administrators ensure availability and reliability of critical business applications. With out-of-the-box monitoring of application metrics, app servers, web servers, databases, messaging servers, authentication systems, guest operating systems, virtual machines (VMs), vSphere ESX hosts, and more, you'll have single-pane visibility into your entire application stack regardless of where it is deployed.

Below are some screen shots showing the main dashboard page of hyperic along with it's integration into vSphere.