[New fling] Horizon Reach: true insights into an entire cloud pod architecture

For years one of the less optimal things about VMware was the fact that you are not able to get an overview over all pods. Yes with other tooling like vRops or 3rd party monitoring this is possibly but all at a cost. At VMworld US Andrew Morgan presented Horizon Reach or Project Heimdall at that time, to the VMware EUC Champions. This tool sounded like the solution to get an easy overview over all pods. While I wasn’t there I definitely was interested and managed to get my hands on some of the early beta releases. With each and every release the stool started to look better and better. It was so good that at VMworld EU it received the first spot in the Top 5 EUC tools that Hans Kraaijeveld and I presented about at the EUC Tapas and Beer Community event.

Yesterday the fling finally was released and announced at Andrews own blog.

Index

Installing

Configuring

The Dashboards

But wait there’s more!

[sta_anchor id=”installing” /]

Installing

Installing reach is as easy as unpacking the zip and running the nstall-reachservice.ps1 powershell script. This will also provide you with the standard credentials.

[sta_anchor id=”configuring” unsan=”Configuring” /]

Configuring

After logging in for the first time you need to add the credentials to one of your connection servers.

Hit validate tand accept the certificate when using self signed certificates.

Hit validate again

and hit ok

The installation and configuration is also documented in a video posted at the flings site!

[sta_anchor id=”dashboards” /]

The dashboards

First you’ll see the default dashboard with an overview of your entire environment. The graphs need some time to get data, my lab gets powered down every day so it won’t show much.

The alarms dashboard shows alarms from all pods, from my lab you can see that there are two different pod names

And yes my Full Clone server 2016 RDS is in an error state (probably because it isn’t running)

And I could go on and on about all dashboards

[sta_anchor id=”more” /]

But wait there’s more!

At the top right corner we have some extra configuration options.

Enabling/disabling alarms and some tresholds

Connection settings, do you see that it found the other pod automatically?

Web settings that also gives the option to download the configuration and change the two available accounts

And if you want to do some automation against Reach itself you can use the API

 

 

Bookmark the permalink.