During VMworld CloudPhysics released their new Dashboard Feature which saw a change of direction in the way CloudPhysics customers get presented with their data and was the first time Card Based analytics was not used to allow access to the wide array of metrics CloudPhysics stores in their data warehouses.
I’ve been working closely with the CloudPhysics team for a number of years now and they are great at listening to feedback around how to improve the platform. One of my biggest gripes (if you could call it that) over the years was that there was no way to view in detail (and historically) what was happening to a particular VM. One of the other issues was the time it took for data to show up in the CloudPhysics UI which meant that you could get access to data after about thirty minutes.
With the release of Exploration Mode there is more a case for proactive monitoring and analysis of VMs and their issues and the data refresh rate has been brought down to about 15 minutes which allows for more real time troubleshooting as well as allowing us to go back in time a number of days to try and correlate issues and try to look at patterns that might have occurred over the course of those days.
With Exploration Mode, administrators can go back in time, correlating events, issues, and changes that are associated with any selected time range in the vSphere environment, making it possible for users to see exactly what transpired in the seconds, minutes or days leading up to an application performance or availability problem.
To view a VM with Exploration Mode, you use the new Search VMs bar at the top of the CloudPhysics Web Console.
Once the VM has been selected you get taken to a dashboard that gives you configuration details of the VM, any changes (Power Operations, Snapshot, vMotions) that have been done against that VM in the provided date range and a performance graph that covers CPU, Memory, Network and Storage. There is also an Issues section which alerts you to any possible
CloudPhysics have always been a personal favorite of mine and I’m legitimately excited with what the team has got in store to further develop the platform into an extremely powerful analytics tool for VMware based platforms.
They have a free edition which you can tryout here: CloudPhysics Free Edition
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