Customer Use Case
While working with a large Silicon Valley electronic Payment company we ran into a special use case that was not covered by Foglight’s regular reporting. The requirement came from a business unit that was sharing a VMWare Cluster with other business units. The use case was to determine which business unit was using what percentage of the cluster’s available resources over a 30 day period.
Steps towards Success
While this sounds like a simple use case that any monitoring tool could solve, it is not. What you need first is a way to designate which virtual machines or which ESX hosts belong to each organization. In our case we had to resort to ownership at the virtual machine level because there were multiple business units on some of the ESX hosts.
We were able to pull this off because of the unique way that Foglight stores metrics and through the use of Foglight services. We ran through and refined the use case over multiple calls and finally arrived at the exact solution, shown below.
There were two keys to success. First, we had to group the virtual machines by business unit using Foglight services. This gave us the grouping we needed to report on. Second, was to use the Period Sum from the metrics because averages wouldn't have worked. In this case we picked the CPU Used Hertz – Period Sum and the Memory Used – Period Sum. We were then able to run a calculation to add up the Period Sums from each virtual machine that was in a service. There were some other tricky parts, like figuring out which services contained machines for the selected cluster, but in the end it all worked out nicely.
Summary
The end result was that this organization was able to produce a Cluster Utilization report by business unit. They were able to use these results as part of their IT Operations quarterly business reviews. While things like alerting, or using a dashboard inside of Foglight to do diagnostics, offers some value to individual users, becoming part of the business process brings an entirely new level of value. I always tell people with Foglight, that the big wins are the cases where we can become part of your business process. This is one of those cases!
