Overview
The Live Optics software allows any Live Optics account to capture, collect, and analyze performance information from numerous server operating systems using its host-based performance collector, Optical Prime. The following tutorial shows how to connect the Optical Prime software with a VMWare infrastructure using vCenter.
Download and run the Live Optics Windows collector software
- There are two methods to download the collector software:
- From the email you received from your systems consultant inviting you to Live Optics by clicking the Download Collector link.
- From the Live Optics portal, select Collectors from the left menu, then Download Collector. For more information on how to download a Live Optics collector, please see knowledge base article Download the Live Optics Collector Either option will bring you to the Download Collectors page.
Connect to a VMWare vCenter Server
Once you have successfully downloaded and run the Live Optics Software, you can begin to connect a VMWare vCenter Server.
- Select Server & Cloud category, click "Start" under Optical Prime.
- Click the "Next" button to accept the default of connecting to the Live Optics web services to auto-send your results (highly recommended).
- To add the vCenter server to Optical Prime, click the "Add Remote Server" button
- Select "Connect to VMWare vCenter Server” and sub-selection check box for “Include VM Performance data” if desired.
- Enter the IP address of the vCenter server (this can be tested by entering the same IP address in a web browser and verifying that it opens the VMWare vSphere portal page)
- When prompted for authentication credentials, enter an admin or root level account on the vCenter server.
NOTE: The user credentials used to log Optical Prime into vCenter must have at a minimum of read-only permissions to vCenter and is granted access to use the vSPhere Webservices API. In addition, the source machine where Live Optics is running must be able to access the vCenter/vSphere client application.
- Optical Prime will begin scanning vCenter for all the ESXi hosts and data stores attached to it. If a vCenter cluster selection screen pops up, click OK to continue with Optical Prime.
- When Optical Prime has completed its initial discovery, there should be a list of VMWare hosts and attached data stores
- Any additional servers that should be added to Optical Prime before the collector run is initiated, should be added at this point. Once all servers have been added, click "Start Capture" button.
NOTE: The capture duration can be adjusted from as low as 10 min to full 7 days however the default is 24 hours.
- The Live Optics collector is now running and gathering performance data from your servers.
NOTE: While Live Optics is running, you cannot logoff nor reboot the computer that it is running on. This will terminate Live Optics before it has completed its collection schedule and could result in errors in the data. We recommend that the computer running Live Optics be locked during the collector run.
View the Results of the Collection
The Live Optics portal will automatically create a project for collector runs that are streamed back to the Live Optics servers. To access the Live Optics project created for your collector run(s), follow these steps.
- Login to your Live Optics portal account on https://www.liveoptics.com
- Scroll down the dashboard to "Recent Projects". For more information on how to search for your project, see knowledge base article How To Search for Projects in the Live Optics Portal
- You should see a new project ending with the date and time of when the collection was started.
- Click "the project name” to review the report.
NOTE: If you did not stream the Live Optics collector data back to the Live Optics servers, you will have to upload the SIOKIT through the Live Optics portal or the collector. See knowledge base articles Uploading SIOKIT file in the Live Optics collector and Uploading SIOKIT file in the Live Optics Portal for more information.