Tour of VMware’s vCenter Operations Manager

As a former network operations guy, I came to depend on the ability to monitor systems, view capacity and performance metrics and have all relevant information at my fingertips when troubleshooting. As a VMware administrator, it was ideal to have all this information in one place. That’s why I came to love VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOps) – the one monitoring solution built by the engineers who built the cornerstone virtualization platform in most enterprise environments today.

Sure there are other monitoring solutions out there for vSphere – some much simpler than vCOps – but the depth of visibility, gathered metrics, capacity planning and reporting gained by vCOps make it a hard-to-beat solution. Of course with the exhaustive array of graphs, tables and dashboards, it can be a bit intimidating and might even send some folks off to those simpler solutions. For this reason, I decided to provide an online tour of the features and capabilities of VMware’s robust solution and show how to maximize its usage. This will be a series of posts published over the next few weeks, the first of which will be a quick start guide to installing vCOps and getting it up and running. Before I publish that post, however, here is an extensive list of official VMware resources as well as some other fantastic resources provided by folks in the community to get anyone started. Hope you find this useful.

Downloads

Product and Support