Audience and Features

Audience

If you are a Solutions administrator or a Splunk technical user, then this document is for you. You are a sophisticated Splunk user who has a good understanding of Splunk and who has experience working with Splunk configuration files. You may also have some prior knowledge of virtualized environments.

You will download and install Splunk for VMware to work with Splunk. You will configure the Solution components to get the required data from your environment, index it in Splunk, and map it to the dashboards in the Splunk App for VMware.

As a user you:

• Know your environment and you know your data.
• Can download and install Splunk for VMware.
• Will get value from the views and dashboards.
• Are comfortable working from the command line and working with configuring and managing the components of your environment.

What you should know before using the solution

Configuring Splunk to work in your environment involves running scripts and making changes to files on the command line. It also helps if you are familiar with using the Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL) and have some previous knowledge of how indexes, sources, source types, and field extractions work.

Features

Splunk for VMware provides:

• Performance metrics directly from the vSphere hosts.
• Data persistence for analysis and trending.
• Analysis and reporting of vCenter (VC) tasks and events.
• Easy correlation of virtualization layer data with data from other tiers such as applications or operating system information from inside virtual machines and the supporting hardware.
• Pre-built views showing tasks associated with hosts and events associated with data health.
• Inventory views where you can monitor the components of your VMware environment.
• Performance views where you can monitor the performance of your hosts and virtual machines.