Monitor and Troubleshoot VMware Infrastructure with Splunk

Splunkbase apps are very popular among IT administrators and provide out-of-the-box content for different infrastructure types such as Windows, Unix, VMware, and AWS. As customers expanded their need for more infrastructure types, they historically had to manage and leverage multiple apps. We have now introduced IT Essentials Work, one centralized app that provides a simpler way to centrally monitor and troubleshoot across different infrastructure types without having to install and maintain different apps.

In this blog post, we will focus on VMware monitoring, and how customers can use IT Essentials Work for this use case. Prior to launching IT Essentials Work, Splunk offered Splunk App for VMWare, a premium app for customers with large VMWare infrastructure. This app only covers VMWare monitoring at the host level, and customers with multiple infrastructure types have had to maintain multiple, individual apps. Managing disparate apps creates silos and don’t provide full context across an IT environment (especially when troubleshooting).

^{Splunk App for VMWare dashboard}

Break Down Silos

IT Essentials Work will help break these silos. Customers can start troubleshooting their VMWare infrastructure in minutes with out of the box metrics for ESXi hosts, vCenters, datastores, and Virtual Machines. Customers can monitor VMware infrastructure and other infrastructure types (or entity types) side by side, to quickly analyze the performance of a host in context with databases, storage, or a server running inside the host. We believe this puts the power in the hands of the administrator and the end-users to get a sense of infrastructure performance without having to switch between different apps.

^{Infrastructure Overview in IT Essentials Work and IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)}

While we have supported host-level monitoring for a while, we will migrate the rest of the dashboards from Splunk App for VMWare into IT Essentials Work. The metrics-to-log correlation at a VM or an ESXi host level gives the user a faster troubleshooting experience, reducing mean time to failure. Finally, IT administrators can set up alerts at a specific infrastructure level and analyze alerts across different infrastructure types.

Executive Visibility

Apart from providing end-to-end visibility at the infrastructure level, IT Essentials Work also shares the same code base with IT Service Intelligence (ITSI), our premium analytics solution, to facilitate an easy upgrade.

^{Service Analyzer view in ITSI}

ITSI leverages the infrastructure data along with other business-related data so administrators can build executive dashboards for real-time visibility across business and infrastructure performance. With its Event Analytics features, ITSI can intelligently group, mute and route alerts generated in IT Essentials Work for efficient triage and troubleshooting.

Next Steps

On April 30, 2021, we will end the sale of the Splunk App for VMware. As an alternative, customers can choose between IT Essentials Work 4.9 and ITSI 4.9 (releasing early May), based on their requirements. Existing support contracts will be honored until their end date providing sufficient time for the current Splunk App for VMware users to migrate to the new experience.

Customers that manage Splunk in their data centers can download IT Essentials Work for free from Splunkbase. Customers that use Splunk Cloud can request support-assisted installation for IT Essentials Work through the ticketing workflow. Splunk sales and customer success teams can help determine whether IT Essentials Work or ITSI is the right option moving forward.

Summary

This is an exciting change as we are moving towards a simple yet powerful consolidated user experience for IT administrators. We understand how much the features from these apps are important for our customers, so we have built the new app with customer experience in mind. With a simple data ingestion mechanism and an easy configuration experience, we expect customers to benefit from IT Essentials Work to monitor across different infrastructure types.