Documentation forSolarWinds Observability

Virtual device monitoring with Hybrid Cloud Observability

Virtual devices — clusters, hosts, virtual machines, and virtual datastores monitored with Hybrid Cloud Observability can easily be monitored alongside infrastructure entities in SolarWinds Observability. Using Platform Connect, virtual devices can be brought into SolarWinds Observability as entities.

Monitor virtual entities

If you have virtual nodes in Hybrid Cloud Observability that you want to monitor in SolarWinds Observability, set up Platform Connect to stream data from Hybrid Cloud Observability to SolarWinds Observability. To use Platform Connect, a commercial Hybrid Cloud Observability license must be activated on your SolarWinds Platform server.

  1. Copy or create an API token (Ingestion type), found in the settings area of SolarWinds Observability. See API Tokens for details.

  2. In the SolarWinds Platform Web Console settings, open Platform Connect. Follow the on-screen prompts to install and configure the SolarWinds Observability Agent, entering the API token created earlier. See Connect Hybrid Cloud Observability to SolarWinds Observability with Platform Connect for details.

After Platform Connect setup is completed, virtual nodes are available as virtual entities in SolarWinds Observability, as are many other Hybrid Cloud Observability nodes.

For more information about virtual nodes, including how to add or configure them in Hybrid Cloud Observability, see the Hybrid Cloud Observability virtual documentation.

View virtual device data

Go to Infrastructure > Virtualization to view a list of your observed virtual devices. Select a virtual cluster, virtual, virtual host, virtual device, or virtual datastore tab, then select a virtual device from the list at the bottom of the page to view detailed information, including Hybrid Cloud Observability status and details. Each tab displays the number of virtual devices in each category and their current health score. Metric data collected by Hybrid Cloud Observability is available as widgets in each tab.

Depending on the data collected in Hybrid Cloud Observability, the virtual device entity's details view also includes information regarding parent hosts or clusters, device name, and IP address. The information in the Virtualization area is refreshed automatically. Transferring VMs from one host to another is reflected in SolarWinds Observability immediately.

At the top of the Overview page there are three widgets displaying general information about the entire environment:

  • Overall Health

  • Health Distribution

  • Active Alerts

View virtual device details

The virtual device details view consists of the Overview and Storage tabs that contain additional widgets providing valuable information. The following widgets are available, depending on the accessed device type:

  • Health Score

  • Active Alerts

  • Top 10 VMs by Used Space — identifies VMs that consume the most storage resources, helps with capacity planning and resource allocation.

  • Top 10 VMs by Allocated Space — lists the VMs based on the storage space allocated to them on a particular datastore.

  • IOPs: Top VMs — provides information on the Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPs) for VMs on a particular datastore.

  • Latency: Top VMs — latency (response time) experienced by VMs accessing a particular datastore.

  • Disk Volumes — shows details of disk volumes associated with a specific VM.

  • List of connected storages — shows details of storage devices associated with a specific VM or host.

  • Datastores on Virtualization Summary — provides an overview of all datastores within the environment.

Virtual device metrics are also available in the Metrics Explorer, using the sw.collector.virtualization prefix.

The Virtual Machine Details sidebar in the details view also contains more information on the device and lets you add your own custom tags.