Why Didn’t I Know About This Sooner? Aria and Its Unique Features
At INDEVOPS, we aim high but keep our feet on the ground. We’ve been specializing in the Aria Suite, particularly Aria Operations, for nearly 7 years. And for those 7 years, when we’ve talked about how fantastic this tool is and how unique its capabilities are, every time our listeners’ eyes widen in amazement: “Why didn’t I know about this sooner?”.
Let me remind you that Aria Operations, commonly referred to by us as #AROPS, is a tool for analytics in monitoring (#AIOPS, or #MLOps), for comprehensive monitoring, performance management, and optimization of IT environments in data centers. AROPS, together with Aria Operations for Logs and plugins and agents, allows you to collect from everything you can imagine, from a rack cabinet in a data center to the inside of an application (yes, yes, that’s also possible).
At the beginning of their journey with Aria, customers have difficulty fully understanding its potential uses. We have our own way of configuring it to enable success in the shortest possible time, so our story about how we do it is different from VMware’s.
- How do we present the collected information and what does it mean?
- The key is to divide the entire IT stack into layers: data center, servers, networking, #storage, #middleware, applications, and access.
- We present the layers as “health” circles, as well as heatmaps of objects that allow you to quickly determine their state.
- The layers are divided into business services so that business owners and operators only see their own service.
- What do we put in each “circle”?
- A “circle” is a group of objects that make up a given layer or business service.
- The “circle” has a “%” – expressing the health of all the objects inside it.
- In this way, we know whether a business service or service layer, or an entire layer in the data center is.
- Here’s a separate story about business services:
- because universal metrics allow them to be effectively monitored immediately,
- there is no need to calculate complicated SLAs,
- it is easy to identify the components of a business service.
- How do we tune alarms, which reduces their number by 45% at the start?
- Thanks to our experience, we have a ready-made recipe to prevent you from being flooded with alarms and notifications.
- We won’t give you a ready-made recipe here.
- We treat each case individually.
- And then all the “little things”:
- How do we configure monitoring robots?
- How do we monitor services?
- How do we query application portals from outside?
- How do we check certificates and much more?
- How do we use agents optimally?
- Lately, the presentation of automation combined with monitoring has been a hit:
- How to trigger automatic actions when the disk is full?
- How to collect reports from domain systems into one place?
- It’s great because our presentations are lively and customers ask specific questions, they know what they are looking for and what matters to them, e.g.:
- What else can I connect to monitor?
- How do the metrics work?
- How to build a clear and functional #dashboard?
In answering these and other questions, and at every stage of such a conversation, we support ourselves with real-life examples. This is very important because then the customer has a chance to imagine and place every detail.
The icing on the cake is always a story about our own management and content packs. Yes, yes, we write our own management packs (more on that soon ).
At the end, the potential customer is left with their mouth open.
For the most curious ones, we can provide documentation.
And for the biggest skeptics, we have a reference visit.
Everything you need to make a customer happy.
Write to us about Aria Operations and other topics related to analytics in monitoring, orchestration and automation.
Do you want to implement it in your environment, or do you want to monitor a specific element in your data center? Let us know.
This text was inspired by a visit to a client and a note taken by our engineer. Unfortunately, I won’t write which one, because the sensitivity of this information does not allow it. This visit, the first in a long time to a new potential customer, who was left with his mouth open.
Take care!
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