TO TAS Quick Start Guide - Part 1

Products

• Insights

Issue/Introduction

VMware Aria Operations for Applications provides an out-of-the-box (OOTB) integration for monitoring health and performance of TAS deployments and applications.  

The integration works by deploying TO TAS tile in TAS ops manager. This quick start guide is divided into two parts, the first part goes over the steps of installing and configuring the TO TAS tile and summary of OOTB TAS dashboards while the second part covers tile architecture and some installation considerations that may be useful in some cases. 

Resolution

Prerequisites:  

Following are the prerequisites for this guide; 

• TAS supported versions: TAS v2.11 and later and TAS v2.7 LTS 
• Access to ops manager 

TO TAS Tile Download and Installation: 

1. Download the VMware Aria Operations for Applications TAS tile version 4 f
2. Navigate to the Ops Manager Installation Dashboard and click Import a Product to upload the product file. 
3. Under the Import a Product button, click + next to the version number of VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront Nozzle. This adds the tile to your staging area. 
4. Click the newly added Wavefront by VMware Nozzle for PCF tile. 
5. Assign AZs and Networks 
6. Click Wavefront Proxy Config 
   1. Enter the following in the Wavefront Proxy Config page:
   2. Wavefront Instance URL: Wavefront  URL, https://YOUR_INSTANCE.wavefront.com/api
   3. Wavefront API Token: Generate a WF API token following these steps or use an existing API token
   4. User friendly hostname: A unique hostname for the proxy such as DOMAIN-tas-proxy
      
7. Click Telegraf Agent Config
8. Enter the following in the Telegraf Agent Config page: 
   • Foundation Name: Give a meaningful foundation name as this name will be the source field of all platform metrics that will get ingested from the foundation 
     
9. Return to the Ops Manager Installation Dashboard and click Apply changes to install VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront Nozzle tile.
10. At this point the metrics should have start ingesting into TO.
11. Go to your Tanzu Observability Instance https://YOUR_INSTANCE.wavefront.com/ and click on the Integrations button on the top of UI. 
    
12. Click on the “Tanzu Application Service (Beta) Integration” tile and start monitoring your platform with the out of the box dashboards which provide detailed insights into platform. You can find OOTB dashboards under "Dashboards" tab in below screenshot.

Aria Operations for Applications TAS Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) Dashboards: 

The table below shows the list of current OOTB dashboards along with a brief description of each one. The OOTB dashboards provides complete platform monitoring and enables you to proactively detect an impending issue and reduce MTTR in case of any issues.   

Dashboard	Brief Description
TAS: All Jobs	Overall health of the TAS deployment
TAS: App Instances	Detailed view of number and status of Application Instances (AIs)
TAS: BOSH Director Health	Detailed view of BOSH Director health
TAS: CLI Health	Health of CLI within TAS
TAS: Certificate Expiration	Detailed view of the validity of the certificates
TAS: Diego/Capacity	Detailed Diego metrics
TAS: Logging and Metrics Pipeline	Health check of Logging and Metrics Firehose
TAS: Ops Manager Health	Health check of Ops Manager
TAS: Router	Detailed Gorouter metrics
TAS: TAS Job Details	Detailed view of TAS job information.
TAS: TAS MySQL Health	Real-time visibility into the TAS MySQL status.
TAS: TAS Workload Monitoring	Information about applications running inside of TAS including RED metrics

Every dashboard has a header chart that provides detailed information about dashboard. 

For example, the “All Jobs” dashboard has the header chart as shown below. 

Also, in majority of charts, there is description about what exactly the chart shows (as shown below) and how you can use it to troubleshoot an issue. This allows users to readily understand the purpose of the chart and how to make the best use of it.  

Conclusion: 

You are all set for TAS monitoring. The integration focuses on the platform persona and provides in-depth observability experience for platform. You won’t need to use healthwatch for visualizations after installing TO TAS integration. We are continually working to add OOTB alerts for platform and apps and additional OOTB dashboards for platform/apps monitoring. 

Proceed to part-2 of the quick start guide if you are interested in understanding the TO TAS tile architecture and some installation customizations that may be useful in some cases.