Course Overview

This course, designed for experienced VMware vRealize® Operations™ users, gives you the skills to monitor and troubleshoot various VMware vSphere® and datacenter related issues using VMware vRealize® Operations Manager™. This course is a combination of lecture and the hands-on labs. You will learn the tools, techniques, and troubleshooting methodologies which will be handy if you already use or want to use vRealize Operations Manager as your preferred datacenter monitoring solution.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Understand the vRealize Operations architecture in detail
• Learn to access various databases that exist within the vRealize Operations software
• Become familiar with the tools and commands that are used to troubleshoot problems that may arise with vRealize Operations 
• Understand the correct approach to troubleshoot data collection issues
• Understand how Predictive DRS helps in effective vSphere workload balancing
• Perform in-depth log analysis to drill down to the root cause of issues faster
• Fix broken state of the product using break-fix labs
• Fix operating systems and application monitoring issues
• Understand how vRealize Operations uses the various self-monitoring mechanisms
• Understand the SSL certificate replacement process
• Understand the upgrade workflow in detail and fix issues related to the product upgrade

Target Audience

• This course is designed for new and experienced system administrators, service engineers, and technical personnel who use vRealize Operations Manager as a datacenter-monitoring solution in their environments.

Course Modules

1. vRealize Operations Architecture and Self-Performance Troubleshooting

• Explain vRealize Operations 6.6 architecture and its components
• Describe the functionalities of Shard Map and GemFire 
• Explain node and cluster-related properties file 
• Describe node addition, deletion workflow, and best practices
• Outline vRealize Operations self-monitoring workflow
• Explain performance troubleshooting and best practices
• Explain key configuration files and services with ports
• Analyze the analytics-.log, log4j.properties, and ystem-exit-analytics-.log files to identify performance issues

2. Database Access and Troubleshooting

• Describe the architecture and components of a database
• List the types of databases and the data type used with vRealize Operations
• Explain about the database configuration files
• Outline the uses of the Platform-CLI tool in collecting information and troubleshooting purposes
• Explain how to use NODETOOL and CQLSHRC CLI tool with Cassandra database for troubleshooting 
• Explain how Activities and Shard maps store data
• Describe the architecture and functionality of the FSDB structure with respect to vRealize Operations

3. End Point Operations

• Outline the differences between Hyperic and End Point Operations
• Describe the components, architecture, and stages of End Point Operations
• Explain how to install and uninstall an End Point Operations agent
• Explain how server mapping, remote checker, multiprocess, and relationship and mapping features help in troubleshooting issues in a vRealize Operations environment
• Explain how to upgrade End Point Operations agent
• Identify the troubleshooting scenarios where reinstalling End Point Operations agent is a possible fix
• Analyze the agent-side logs such as wrapper.log and agent.log to check if the agent is corrupt
• Delete the duplicate object on the server
• List information about product support, licensing, logs, and debug mode

4. vRealize Operations Data Collection and Metrics Troubleshooting

• Explain how data is collected in vRealize Operations
• Outline the role of collector, GemFire, and Analytics in the entire data collection and data processing chain
• Explain how collector groups provide adapter resiliency
• Explain how to troubleshoot problems related to data collection failures/missing metrics
• Explain how to scrub logs in the event of data collection failures/missing metrics
• Run the service vmware-vcops status collector command to check the status of the remote collector
• Analyze the Check Collector and VMwareAdapter log files to identify issues related to heartbeat
• Run the CURL command to check the connectivity of a remote controller with the master node 
• Enable debug logging for the collector

5. Advanced Reports and Views

• Explain how to generate views and reports in vRealize Operations
• Understand the different types of views with the help of examples
• List the internal components of views and reports
• Explain how to troubleshoot issues related to views and reports
• Create a custom view
• Create a report by adding all the custom view definitions
• Schedule a report generation and store the generated reports on the network share

6. pDRS

• Explain the differences between traditional and pDRS
• Explain how pDRS works
• List the metrics to be considered for pDRS calculations
• Explain how vCenter Server uses the pDRS forecast
• Analyze the pDRS logs

7. vRealize Operations Upgrade

• Explain the various upgrade paths and prerequisites
• Review the log files that are generated during the various stages of the upgrade process
• Outline the workflow of the upgrade process
• List the directories that are impacted during the upgrade process
• Explain the importance of the validate, updateCoordinator, and upgradeChecker Python files
• Analyze the casa.log file to identify the root cause of a node's sluggish behavior and upgrade failures

8. SSL Certificates

• Explain the use of self-signed and custom certificates in vRealize Operations 
• Describe the process of generating and applying the self-signed certificates
• Describe the process of generating and applying the custom certificates
• Describe the certificate replacement workflow
• Explain how to use the custom certificate tool