Visualizing your virtual data center environment with IBM Cloud Monitoring

Starting on 28 March 2024, VMware Shared will no longer be available for new deployments. Existing instances will continue to be supported until 15 January 2025. Ensure that you migrate all your VMware Shared resources to IBM Cloud® for VMware as a Service by 15 January 2025. For more information, see End of Support for VMware Shared deployments.

VMware Shared provides an integration with IBM Cloud® Monitoring, which allows you to use a dashboard, provided by VMware Shared to view metrics for your virtual data centers. Alternatively, you can create your own dashboard to visualize performance, volume of usage, and to define alerts to monitor your environment.

Use Monitoring dashboards to complete the following tasks.

Explore and easily visualize your environment.
Accelerate a diagnosis and a resolution for performance incidents.
Control cost of monitoring infrastructure.
Mitigate impact of abnormal situations with proactive notifications.

For more information about the benefits of using Monitoring, see Getting started with IBM Cloud Monitoring.

Provisioning an IBM Cloud Monitoring instance

Before you can view platform metrics for your virtual data center, you must order a Monitoring instance.

Review the following requirements for your instance order.

Order the instance with the Graduated Tier plan, not the Lite plan.
The instance must be within the same region as your virtual data center instance.
You must enable the automatic collection of platform metrics.

To order the Monitoring instance:

From the IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions console, click Resources > VMware Shared from the left navigation pane.
In the VMware Shared table, select the instance for which you want to collect platform metrics.
From the instance details page, click the Actions menu and click Add monitoring.
On the Monitoring provisioning page, complete the steps in Provisioning an instance to order a Monitoring instance and enable the automatic platform metrics collection.

Viewing platform metrics for your virtual data center

After you order your Monitoring instance, you can view the platform metrics in the Monitoring console.

In the VMware Shared table, select the virtual data center for which you want to view platform metrics.
From the virtual data center details page, click the Actions menu and click Monitoring. The Monitoring dashboard displays the metrics for the associated instance.

VMware Shared metrics

VMware Shared provides the following metrics for the default dashboard:

vCPU usage
vCPU allocation
Memory usage
Memory allocation
Storage usage

Metrics updates can be delayed by up to 60 minutes.

VMware virtual data center vCPU usage

The following table displays the total usage of the virtual data center vCPU.

Table 1. Virtual data center vCPU usage
Metadata	Description
`Metric Name`	`ibm_vmwaresolutions_vdc_vcpu_usage`
`Metric Type`	`gauge`
`Unit`	`none`
`Segment By`	`Service instance ID`

VMware virtual data center vCPU allocation

The following table displays the total allocation of the virtual data center vCPU.

Table 2. Virtual data center vCPU allocation
Metadata	Description
`Metric Name`	`ibm_vmwaresolutions_vdc_vcpu_allocation`
`Metric Type`	`gauge`
`Unit`	`none`
`Segment By`	`Service instance ID`

VMware virtual data center memory usage

The following table displays the total usage of the virtual data center memory.

Table 3. Virtual data center memory usage
Metadata	Description
`Metric Name`	`ibm_vmwaresolutions_vdc_memory_usage`
`Metric Type`	`gauge`
`Unit`	`byte`
`Segment By`	`Service instance ID`

VMware virtual data center memory allocation

The following table displays the total allocation of the virtual data center memory.

Table 4. Virtual data center memory allocation
Metadata	Description
`Metric Name`	`ibm_vmwaresolutions_vdc_memory_allocation`
`Metric Type`	`gauge`
`Unit`	`byte`
`Segment By`	`Service instance ID`

VMware virtual data center storage usage

The following table displays the total usage of the virtual data center storage.

Table 5. Virtual data center storage usage
Metadata	Description
`Metric Name`	`ibm_vmwaresolutions_vdc_storage_usage`
`Metric Type`	`gauge`
`Unit`	`byte`
`Segment By`	`Service instance ID`

Customizing your VMware Shared dashboard

To customize your dashboard:

In the Monitoring console, click Dashboards from the left navigation pane.
Click the IBM menu and click VMware Solutions Shared.
Customize your dashboard. For more information, see Dashboards.