OnCommand Balance to monitor Cisco Unity Linux servers?

[SIGEPSPAM]

Does anyone have any guidance on using Balance to monitor Cisco Unity/UNS/VOIP customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers?

I did a search of the forums and documentation and didn't see anything.

I've not asked Cisco TAC yet -- but I know that Cisco is usually very precise and picky about their voicemail/Unity servers.Anyone doing this?

I would assume per the "OnCommand Balance Installation and Configuration Guide" on page 23 - that we would just follow the RHEL best-practice methods to monitor/report on the servers?

If a non-root sudo user is used to pull performance metrics from these customized RHEL servers -- then there should be no worry about causing Unity application issues, right?

Balance sees these virtual machines -- it just cannot monitor them because we haven't entered the credentials. Our voice manager had some worries/questions before he lets Balance loose on his servers.

Any help/tips/tricks/411 would be great. thanks... 

[SIGEPSPAM · Accepted solution]

I heard back from Cisco TAC in regards to their customized RHEL-Linux servers (Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.6.2; Cisco Unity Connection 8.6.2; Cisco Unified Presence Server 8.6.2; Cisco Contact Center Express 8.6.2)

and attempting to use NetApp Balance. Their response was basically no. “About the non-root access with Sudo, that is not possible because we would need to use a root account as well. We only login with root in very specifics scenarios where there is a bug involved.”

So it looks like other 3rd party tools that can gather statistics/pings, etc. will need to be used instead.

I hope this post is helpful for those who might think about monitoring such servers in the future.

[plauterb]

Since these are VMs, Balance can get the majority of the performance information fro vCenter. Balance will calculate a Performance Index for the VM, which tells you how well the VM is performing.

Also, you will be able to see the I/O contribution from the VM to the storage systems.

However, without monitoring the guest, you will not be able to tell if any of the partitions are misaligned. Use the NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) for this.