Design guidelines for monitoring the vCloud consumer resources and workloads are the same as for monitoring vSphere. However, there are additional vCloud-specific considerations for VMware vCloud Networking and Security Edge and vCloud consumer workloads.

VMware vCloud Networking and Security Edge appliances are self-contained environments that are stateless in nature. There is a “health check” API call that can be made to an edge appliance to determine if it is functioning correctly. If the API returns negative, initiate a reboot of the edge device. At the time of reboot, configuration information is updated from the VMware vCloud Networking and Security Manager, and the edge device continues to function properly.

It might be desirable to monitor workloads provisioned by vCloud consumers. vCloud Director does not provide any built-in monitoring of workloads for availability or performance. Several third-party solutions are available to monitor vSphere resources and workloads running on vSphere. However, all of these solutions might not work all of the time when vCloud Director is in use. Isolated networking in vApps might prevent monitoring tools from acquiring the performance or availability information of a vApp. Furthermore, vApps might be provisioned and de-provisioned or power-cycled at any time by a vCloud consumer and these actions might create false positives in the monitoring environment. Until there are solutions in the market that are fully integrated with vCloud Director, it might be difficult to provide detailed monitoring for vCloud consumer workloads.