Based on Zenoss technology, UCS Performance Manager is a subset system of it and delivers granular device monitoring and real-time performance matrices for all the components. It uses the Cisco UCS API and other native APIs to collect the data from Cisco UCS Manager and other integrated infrastructure endpoints, to display comprehensive useful information to easily detect issues and problems in all the components. It is a graphical based web interface to monitor and visualize the UCS infrastructure and it helps in reducing risk associated with the failure of devices and components. It triggers the alerts to administrators for any current problems and future problems in advance for both physical and virtual components, including compute, network, storage and virtual components:

UCSPM can be deployed as a single host or multi-host deployment. Single-host deployment can support up to 500 servers, where multi-host deployment can scale up to 2,500 servers. UCSPM v2 can be downloaded as an OVA or ISO image from the Cisco portal and requires 64 GB memory for providing better performance.

After installing the UCSPM virtual machine, it requires virtual hostname configuration in the Control Center. It doesn't listen directly on TCP ports and it would need DNS configuration to reach a virtual hostname. The Control Center provides the configuration to carry out the required modifications. It provides an intuitive HTML5 web interface for monitoring the UCS infrastructure and its components.

UCSPM provides the following capabilities to actively monitor the infrastructure:

• Single console for device health and performance monitoring of physical and virtual components
• Dependency mapping for all the components
• Forecast utilization of resource capacity
• A comparison of current and historical performance issues impacting on any application workloads
• Identification of congestion sources for IOM server ports, Ethernet uplinks, and FC uplinks, providing fixes
• Fabric utilization trends, graphs, and reports
• Scalable and module architecture for expansion

UCSPM is packaged as a Docker container to provide horizontal scalability to multiple virtual machines as an underlying service in the Control Center. The Control Center is based on a service-oriented architecture, which enables applications to run as a set of distributed services across multiple virtual machines. It manages the pools of VM resources (compute, storage, and network) for UCSPM and provides a high-performance Hadoop database with Apache HBase. The following screenshot displays the consolidated dashboard of UCSPM. It provides an additional dashboard and portlet to customize the dashboard with the desired graphs and stats monitoring:

The following screenshot shows the physical topology of UCS and the integrated components:

The following screenshot shows the visibility of virtual infrastructure components integrated with UCS: