In August, we announced that Zenoss was collaborating with Cisco on another product to make management and monitoring of Cisco UCS environments easier and more effective. Cisco UCS Performance Manager (UCSPM) officially launched in October, and feedback from customers so far is extremely positive.
Understanding Cisco UCS Performance Manager (UCSPM)
Zenoss and Cisco jointly developed UCSPM to help customers maximize the capacity and performance of their UCS systems.
There is a UCSPM Express Edition that provides detailed insight into the UCS fabric – both physical components such as fabric interconnects, chassis, and IO modules, and logical components like port channels, service profiles, vNICs and vHBAs.
The full version extends capacity and performance analysis to the components of Cisco UCS integrated infrastructures like VCE Vblock, NetApp FlexPod, and EMC VSPEX. You can also use the full version to create application groups to help identify where integrated infrastructure issues may be affecting application performance.
UCSPM Benefits
One of the most impressive benefits of UCSPM is how quickly customers see value. A recent example of this is a regional insurance company that was having application performance problems. They assumed the problems stemmed from fabric contention and were preparing for an expensive upgrade. To confirm their suspicions, they decided to use the Cisco UCSPM tool. It took them all of 15 minutes to download and install, since they didn’t do any configuration at all. They just let it run – sitting there collecting and analyzing data.
When the IT team came back to it a week later, they saw immediately that overcommitted fabric wasn’t the issue at all. The UCSPM interface clearly showed that sufficient headroom for both LAN and SAN traffic was available with their current hardware investment. For 15 minutes of work, they were able to avoid spending thousands of dollars on capacity they didn’t need.
Learn More
Cisco UCSPM can add a powerful tool to your monitoring arsenal. If you want to learn more, the UCS Tech Talk: Monitoring UCS Integated Infrastructure with UCS Performance Manager provides an hour-long introduction on what’s new and cool in the product. The Cisco UCS Performance Manager site also has a lot of great information, including a link to the UCSPM download. Keep in mind that Cisco UCSPM is sold exclusively by Cisco and Cisco partners – but your Zenoss account team can also help point you in the right direction!
The following resources provide more about the Zenoss partnership with Cisco:
