Pure Storage: Management Pack 3.0.1 for vRealize Operations Manager (vROps)
Pure Storage Management Pack 3.0.1 for vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) has been officially released! This release is exciting for me personally because it signifies a landmark that we are starting to accelerate in our vRealize Operations Manager integration.
You’ll recall with the 3.0.0 management pack that there were no significant changes made as we wanted to focus on the integration with vROps 8.x due to changes in the underlying SDK. With that now out of the way we were able to focus more on critical fixes and adding several new improvements.
What’s New?
I won’t get into a lot of information on the blog post here simply because we have taken time to outline the changes in the Release Notes (link below) in-depth. But there are a couple of things I feel are important to outline and be sure they are understood.
Fixes
The fix I want to address is the one I blogged about last month: Alerts triggered for potentially stale objects. Since the release of vROps 8.x we have had a handful of customers run into this issue. As noted in the referenced blog post, the underlying issue is within vROps itself, but after working with VMware engineering we were able to come up with a way to fix the issue within our management pack (MP). VMware still intends to resolve the issue in upcoming releases for other vendors but we determined resolving the issue within the MP makes sense for two reasons:
1. The first reason is that we are able to get a fix out more quickly for our shared customers. Since 3.0.1 was almost ready for release when the fix was determined we decided the best route was to get this out as quickly as possible.
2. The second reason, and a major driving factor, was that by implementing this change within the MP we are “future proofing” from any regressions that could happen within vROps.
With this fix in place customer’s are no longer erroneously alerted by vROps for non-issues. This will quiet things down and allow administrators to focus on the real problems.
Enhancements
The main enhancement to discuss here has to do with alerting. For quite some time we have had discussions with customers who were concerned that not all alerts were propagated from the FlashArray to vROps.
After some investigation into the issue it was determined that this was happening because some alerts were opened and closed in between vROps discovery jobs that occur every 5 minutes. Since the management pack (MP) only queries for open alerts on the FlashArray this resulted in the alert being missed. We know that customers want to know about all of the alerts being triggered on their FlashArrays, whether or not they were closed quickly, so we have changed how we query alerts on the FlashArray.
With this new change in place the vROps MP now queries open alerts and alerts that have been opened and closed within the last 24 hours. So now if an alert is opened and closed in a short period of time it will still be reported in vROps.
Documentation
Below is the link to download 3.0.1 along with the 3.0 User Guide and Release Notes:
Pure Storage Management Pack 3.0.1 Download
Pure Storage Management Pack 3.0 Release Notes
Pure Storage Management Pack 3.0 User Guide
It always feels good to get a new release pushed out the door and available for customers! Be sure to read the Release Notes for more information about what is fixed and what is new!
IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to several critical fixes in this version it is recommended that any customer that is on MP 3.0.0 upgrade to 3.0.1 for better stability and accurate reporting.
An equally good feeling for me though is focusing on what we get to do next to make our product just a little better. So if you have any feedback or wish to see any new integrations please let us know!
-jhop
