vSphere Mobile Watchlist: Monitoring On The Go
Mobile devices are infiltrating our lives and changing our every behavior and habit-- from the way we shop, to the way we learn and even the way we make decisions. So, IT professionals are expected to gravitate and welcome mobile applications that allow them to perform certain aspects of their jobs on the go.
VMware's solution for monitoring VMs is vSphere Mobile Watchlist. Available in both the Apple AppStore and the Android Market, the app can monitor and alert, and it has remediation and delegation capabilities. You are able to configure a watchlist of important VMs and can monitor them on the go. In the event of an issue, you are able to initiate remediation or delegate the task to another member that can help in troubleshooting the issue. The idea here is that you can be made aware of an issue or outage as near to real-time as possible, and can respond with some form of action.
From a remediation perspective, the application can be used to initiate all power operations that can be done from a traditional client, such as a restart, shutdown, reset, power on and power off. The application also provides a dashboard with a summarized view of watched VMs, where you can view state and health and other information.
From vSphere Mobile Watchlist you can acknowledge any alerts that the VM presents, and disregard those that are safe for now and act on the ones that need immediate attention. What I also like is that the application is able to suggest VMware KB articles that may be relevant to the alerts, which can be passed along to other team members.
Another cool use case that the mobile app enables is "read-only": Mobile users with read-only capabilities can monitor an environment, but are limited in their capability to remediate based on the role or permissions of that person. It should be named "role-based" access, considering you could modify the user profile and give them limited remediation capabilities.
On the security end, VMware applies the same security requirements on vSphere Mobile Watchlist that it does on its popular vSphere Web Client, so this is another good reason and opportunity to seriously consider a Mobile Device or Mobile Application Management strategy as the number of mobile applications being used by end users and even admins continues to grow. Today, in order to run this mobile application, some form of VPN needs to be established in order to meet the security needs for the application to function properly.
Something tells me that we will be seeing more mobile applications that are geared towards IT professionals from the major software vendors in the months to come.
Posted by Elias Khnaser on 03/31/2014 at 3:37 PM