Smarts ESM: Virtual routers in ESM do not correlate with their Router objects in Smarts IP

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


As virtual routers have become more common in IT infrastructures, we have seen an increasing need in the Smarts product to discover and manage these devices so that they can be properly correlated to define root cause analysis during outages.

In the current releases of Smarts IP and Smarts ESM, virtual routers are discovered in this way:

* Smarts IP will discover the device as a Router class object
* Smarts ESM will discover the Hypervisor and the device will be discovered as a Host/Virtual Machine

Currently, there is no correlation between these objects.  Smarts does not recognize that the Router in IP and the Host/Virtual Machine in ESM are actually the same device.  They will generate notifications independently and not correlate to each other in any way.

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Cause

This is caused by the fact that ESM does not recognize other types of devices.  It was primarily used to manage Hypervisors and Virtual Machines.  Now that routers and switches (and most likely other classes of devices) are becoming virtualized, this will become a bigger issue going forward.

Resolution

There is currently no solution or work around for this correlation issue.  It has been submitted as an enhancement request for consideration for a future version of Smarts.