VMware Poller
The VMware Poller microservice polls the availability and hierarchy of virtual machines available in a VMware network. It also provides the topology of the machines and hosts.
This microservice is part of the Discovery microservice pipeline. It uses a worker-coordinator design to balance workloads and allow for scaling. You deploy instances of this microservice and others in the same pipeline to separate clusters for each device zone. See Understanding the Discovery Pipeline in Unified Assurance Concepts for conceptual information.
You can enable redundancy for this microservice when you deploy it. See Configuring Microservice Redundancy for general information.
Autoscaling is enabled by default for this microservice. You can optionally disable autoscaling when you deploy the microservice. See Configuring Autoscaling.
This microservice provides additional Prometheus monitoring metrics. See VMware Poller Self-Monitoring Metrics.
VMware Poller Prerequisites
Before deploying the microservice, confirm that the following prerequisites are met:
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A microservice cluster is set up. See Microservice Cluster Setup.
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The following microservices are deployed:
Deploying VMware Poller
To deploy the microservice, run the following commands:
su - assure1
export NAMESPACE=<namespace>
export WEBFQDN=<WebFQDN>
1helm install <microservice-release-name> assure1/vmware-poller -n $NAMESPACE --set global.imageRegistry=$WEBFQDN
In the commands:
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<namespace> is the namespace where you are deploying the microservice. The default namespace is a1-zone1-pri, but you can change the zone number and, when deploying to a redundant cluster, change pri to sec.
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<WebFQDN> is the fully-qualified domain name of the primary presentation server for the cluster.
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<microservice-release-name> is the name to use for the microservice instance. Oracle recommends using the microservice name (vmware-poller) unless you are deploying multiple instances of the microservice to the same cluster.
You can also use the Unified Assurance UI to deploy microservices. See Deploying a Microservice by Using the UI for more information.
Changing VMware Poller Configuration Parameters
When running the install command, you can optionally change default configuration parameter values by including them in the command with additional --set arguments. You can add as many additional --set arguments as you need.
For example:
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Set a global parameter described in Default Global VMware Poller Configuration by adding --set configData.<parameter_name>=<parameter_value>. For example, --set configData.LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG.
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Set a coordinator-specific or worker-specific parameter by prefixing configData in the argument with coordinator or worker. For example, --set coordinator.configData.LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG. This overrides the global parameter.
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Enable redundancy for the microservice by adding --set redundancy=enabled.
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Disable autoscaling for the microservice by adding --set autoscaling.enabled=false.
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Set the autoscaling parameter described in VMware Poller Autoscaling Configuration by adding --set autoscaling.<parameter_name>=<parameter_value>. For example, --set autoscaling.dataCentersPerWorker=2.
Default SNMP Poller Configuration
Some VMware Poller configurations apply to workers and coordinators, some apply only to coordinators, and some apply only to workers. The parameters set for the workers or coordinators specifically override the global parameters. For example, if you set global log levels to DEBUG, but the log level for coordinators to INFO, then the coordinator logs will use INFO and worker logs will use DEBUG.
Default Global VMware Poller Configuration
The following table describes the default global configuration parameters found in the Helm chart under configData for the microservice. These apply to both workers and coordinators.
| Name | Default Value | Possible Values | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| LOG_LEVEL | INFO | FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG | Logging level used by application. |
Default VMware Poller Worker Configuration
The following table describes the default configuration parameters for workers found in the Helm chart under configData for the microservice.
| Name | Default Value | Possible Values | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| PORT_COORDINATOR | "38890" | Text, 255 characters | Coordinator port. |
| PORT_WORKER | "38891" | Text, 255 characters | Worker port. |
| GRPC_GRACEFUL_CONN_TIME | "60s" | Text, 255 characters | Before attempting to dial to coordinator, for specified time, try checking coordinator readiness. |
| VMWARE_TIMEOUT | "30s" | Text, 255 characters | Configurable timeout for VMware connection time. Specifying a value of zero disables timeout features. Default value is 30s, you must specify unit i.e. 60s, 1m, 10h, 900ms etc. |
| WORKER_RCA_TOPIC | "assure1/discovery/rca" | Text, 255 characters | RCA topic for vmware worker . |
| TOPOLOGY_CONFIG | "true" | Boolean value | Whether to create toplogy (true) or not (false). |
| PULSAR_DISCOVERY_CALLBACK_OVERRIDE | "" | Text, 255 characters | Discovery callback topic. The default is persistent://assure1/discovery/discovery-service-zoneX, where X is the zone where the microservice is deployed. |
Default VMware Poller Coordinator Configuration
The following table describes the default configuration parameters for coordinators found in the Helm chart under configData for the microservice.
| Name | Default Value | Possible Values | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| PORT_COORDINATOR | "38890" | Text, 255 characters | Coordinator port. |
| GRPC_FALLBACK_USE_IP | "true" | Boolean value | Whether to connect to workers using IP addresses (true) or FQDNs (false). |
| PULSAR_VMWARE_CONTROL_OVERRIDE | "persistent://assure1/discovery/vmware-poller-zone%d" | Text, 255 characters | By default, a topic is created for each zone ID. You can override it. |
| REDUNDANCY_POLL_PERIOD | 5 | Integer | The number of seconds between status checks from the secondary microservice to the primary microservice. |
| REDUNDANCY_FAILOVER_THRESHOLD | 4 | Integer | The number of times the primary microservice must fail checks before the secondary microservice becomes active. |
| REDUNDANCY_FALLBACK_THRESHOLD | 1 | Integer | The number of times the primary microservice must succeed checks before the secondary microservice becomes inactive. |
VMware Poller Autoscaling Configuration
Autoscaling is supported for the MS microservice. See Configuring Autoscaling for general information and details about the standard autoscaling configurations.
The VMware Poller microservice also supports the additional configurations described in the following table.
| Name | Default Value | Possible Values | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| dataCentersPerWorker | 1 | Integer | Maximum number of data centers to be polled by each worker. |
VMware Poller Self-Monitoring Metrics
The VMware Poller microservice exposes the self-monitoring metrics for coordinators described in the following table to Prometheus.
Each of the metrics in the table is prefixed with vmware_coordinator in the database. For example, the full metric name in the database for the first metric is vmware_coordinator_total_devices.
| Metric Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| total_devices | Gauge | Total number of devices polled in last poll cycle. |
| total_dataCenters | Gauge | Total number of data centers polled in last poll cycle. |
| total_polltime | Gauge | Total poll time of last poll cycle. |
| total_errors | Gauge | Total errors during last poll cycle. |
Note:
Metric names in the database include a prefix that indicates the service that inserted them. The prefix is prom_ for metrics inserted by Prometheus. For example, total_devices is stored as prom_total_devices in the database.