Content

Highlights

Improved Backend Datagrid

More speed, higher scalability and less memory consumption

Every new platform we add to BVQ° raises the potential count of objects we need to scan, to store, to analyze and to display. With the scalability increase we integrated now, you can add more systems which also can contain a higher number of configuration instances (objects) without significant addition of compute resources to the BVQ Server. In addition, that enables us to enrich BVQ°'s end to end analytics with more new platforms and to perform komplexer analytic processing in coming BVQ° releases.

The biggest part of work that flew into this release improved the performance and memory consumption of our Datagrid Backend. Some major areas of this improvement are:

• Most aggregations are pre-calculated and stored to the DB as part of the scanners persist process. That speeds up loading from DB and further analytic processing.

• Storage of a complete System topology is related to a point in time. You may think of ist as snapshot of all the data of a single system existing for every time a change was detected. That speeds up loading of a whole system configuration for a given point in time.

• Scanner Persist speed was increased significantly. It is better aligned for much higher number of scanned systems, no matter of what platform type they are. The number of concurrent persists a BVQ° Server runs in parallel is automatically tuned in respect to the number of logical CPUs available in the OS. With that the system does no longer need manual tuning to reach a persist throughput near maximum.

• A new method has been integrated to store and calculate durations like the uptime of an operating system effectively.

VMware vCenter improvements

More VMware vCenter use cases added: Snapshot, DRS Score and VM Power consumption monitoring and CPU provisioning optimization

VM Snapshots are often the cause for slow IO and increased storage capacity consumption. Now, VM Snapshots are counted and the age of the oldest is tracked to expose VMs with a unnecessary high snapshot usage. A new dashboard helps to identify VMs with unused CPU resources that can be reduced significantly. A high DRS Score for a VM indicates that it is "happy" running on the current Host. BVQ° now unmasks VMs with a steady unhappy score. With the new electrical power metric, you can identify VMs with high power consumption.

New Attribute & Alert rule for Snapshots

BVQ now counts the number of Snapshots of a Virtual machine. This is also aggregated per VM Host, VM Host cluster and VM vCenter. In addition the age and creation date of the oldest snapshot is also available as attributes of all these four object types.

Two new predefined Alert rules check VMs, if they have too many or too old snapshots. Best practice is described in this VMware article.
After the BVQ Update these Alert rules are disabled by default. If you decide to use them, you need to enable them manually in the following tree:

• VMware

  • Configuration

    • VM VM too many snapshots

    • VM VM snapshot too old

New Dashboard: VMware - Optimize CPU provisioning

The VMware - Optimize CPU provisioning dashboard helps you to locate Virtual Machines with low CPU peak usage (<5%, <20% and <40%) during the last 7 days. To get further information about Cluster, Host or Virtual Machine you can directly jump to more detailed dashboards. Wit that you can find VM candidates that did not use their high amount of provisioned CPU resources. You can lower their CPU resource configuration and free up these resources to be used by other VMs. 

New Metric: DRS Score

The Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) Score is about the execution efficiency of a VM. The performance drivers for the VM DRS score are contention-based, using metrics like CPU % ready time, good CPU cache behavior, and memory swap.

See VMware blog article for more Details.

We added the DRS Score metrics to the Expert Metrics Tab of the VMware VM object type:

We also added an Alert rule to automatically find VMs with a low DRS Score:

New Metric: Electrical power usage

VMware reports an estimated average electrical power usage (Watt) for each VM. We added this statistic to the Expert Metrics Tab of the VMware VM object type:

Support for Brocade directors and power supplies

Brocade Director class switch specifics, like blades and inter chassis links as well as switch power supply health and consumption are now part of BVQ°.

Monitoring of large SANs containing Director class Switches is now much easier with BVQ°. Switch port names now contain the Blade Slot number and the logical Port number starting with 0 for each Blade to ease the identification of an affected physical Port in front of the physical director chassis. We also added power consumption statistics for Switches, Blades and Power supplies to enable energy monitoring. The status of a power supply is also available for outage detection.

BVQ's Brocade module has been enhanced by two new object types (OT) to better support Brocade directors:

• Brocade Blade

• Brocade Power supply

Both object types require a minimum of FOS 9 on Brocade switches and directors to be scanned correctly.

Brocade Blade

A Brocade Blade allows to identify which type of blade is used in which slot. Power consumption is measured as well.

Attributes:

Statistics (Name & Description equivalent to Brocade documentation):

Brocade Power supply

A Brocade Power supply provides information about status and health of the hardware. In addition, BVQ collects environmental information such as power consumption, voltage and temperature.
Brocade switches provide part of that information too.

Attributes:

Statistics (Name & Description equivalent to Brocade documentation):

Brocade Switch port

The name of Brocade Switch ports are changed to show <Slotnumber>/<Portnumber> (<Portname>) instead of just the Port Index number. It also shows the Attributes "Port number", "Slot number" and "Port index" to ease identification.

ITSM

ServiceNow Connector

Visit the Connector wiki page to learn more about how this integration can help elevate your relevant ITIL practices.

Grafana & MongoDB update

Grafana has been updated from version  8 to 10.1.5. This is a major update that contains many Improvements and Bug Fixes.
Take a look at the Grafana changelog for more details: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

MongoDB has ben updated from 5 to  6.0.11. The MongoDB changelog can be found here: https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/release-notes/6.0. We will update to MongoDB v7 in the next major Release.

Grafana: Variables respect time range

The BVQ Grafana Datasource plugin now respects the user defined time range of a dashboard to fill the configured variables with objects that exist or have relations to existing objects in that timeframe. Before that, these variables have been accoring to the current timestamp.

That enables a retrospective representation of the object topology according to the defined time range. One of the major benefits of that feature ist, that you can access configuration instances (objects) that disappeared from the most recent topology in the past (deleted). That also provides access to performance statistics or attribute details of those objects. 

Additional storage peak metrics and attributes

We added further attributes and peak metrics for some storage object types to make them available across all storage platforms supported by BVQ. 

In detail, these are:

• maximum port speed for SVC Node ports

  

• CPU peak utilization for Unity Storage processor

  

• IO rate, data rate and latency peak metrics for NetApp LUN
  

  

Requirements and restrictions