DX Operational Observability

With DX Operational Observability (DX O2) r 26.5.1, we have extended VCF platform support which now  seamlessly integrates VCF Operations (VCFOps) telemetry directly into DX O2. This integration blends full stack observability and advanced AIOps capabilities tailored for the modern private cloud.

Bridging the Gap with the Open Data Connector (ODC)

As organizations increasingly rely on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) to power enterprise private clouds, VCF Administrators, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), and IT Operations teams are tasked with managing immensely complex infrastructures. These teams need a unified view with information and context that spans virtualization, containerization, and application health.

VMware Cloud Foundation Operations (VCFOps) provides robust operations management capabilities specifically designed for the private cloud. To bring this rich data into a centralized observability platform, DX O2 utilizes the Open Data Connector (ODC).

The Open Data Connector (ODC) is a data ingestion framework within DX O2 to seamlessly integrate third-party monitoring tools and platforms into a centralized observability data lake. It acts as the bridge between DX O2 and external systems—not just VCF Operations, but also platforms like AWS, ServiceNow, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and Zabbix. By standardizing how data is pulled via REST APIs, the ODC addresses the data silo challenge: ODC  allows DX O2 to automatically translate third-party metrics and topologies so they are seamlessly available for full stack observability and powerful AIOps capabilities such as analytics. 

The integration works by deploying an ODC VCF Operations Agent, which actively retrieves telemetry—including resources, metrics, and alarms—managed by VCF Operations over its published REST APIs. Internally, the agent gathers this data and routes it to ODC, ensuring that resource topologies are stored in Topology Store (TAS) while critical alarms and events are securely housed in Elasticsearch.

Deployment Flow 

Valuable Telemetry for SREs and Infra Admins: Entities, Topology, and Metrics

To truly understand the health of your private cloud, teams need both broad topological context and deep metric granularity. DX Operational Observability provides both through intuitive, interactive topological views which can be organized by IT domain, digital service or Infra Admins alike.

The ODC VCF Operations Agent automatically builds a hierarchical topology rooted at the VCF Ops instance, mapping two distinct but connected "worlds": the traditional vSphere World and the modern Supervisor/VKS World. Here is how the ingested metrics across these topologies provide direct value to your operational teams:

1. Infrastructure Admins: Capacity, Cost, and Efficiency For Infra Admins, managing the sheer scale of vCenters, Datacenters, and Clusters requires a keen eye on resource allocation and cost optimization.

• Entities Tracked: 

• Why This Matters: DX O2 collects capacity metrics like CPU|Capacity Usage (%) and Mem|Usable Capacity (KB) alongside critical cost analytics. Admins can track Cost|Monthly Total Cluster Cost or Reclaimable|Orphaned Disks|Disk Space to identify potential savings and reclaim unused storage. Additionally, metrics like Summary|Average VM Density and Summary|Rebalance Recommended ensure that hardware is utilized efficiently without risking performance degradation.

2. SREs: Performance, Bottlenecks, and Uptime SREs need to guarantee application performance, which means identifying hardware bottlenecks before they impact the software layer.

• Entities Tracked: 

VMWARE_ESX (Hosts) VMWARE_VM (Virtual Machines) VMWARE_NETWORK

• Why This Matters: Tracking CPU|Ready (%) on a VM helps SREs instantly spot scheduling waits and resource contention, while the Mem|Swap In Rate (KBps) can indicate severe memory starvation. Datastore health is monitored via Datastore|Total Latency (ms) and Datastore|Total Throughput (KBps), allowing teams to pinpoint storage bottlenecks quickly before they degrade application response times.

3. Platform Engineering: Bridging Kubernetes and Infrastructure For teams running Tanzu or Kubernetes workloads on VCF, the integration bridges the gap between infrastructure and containerized workloads.

• Entities Tracked 

• k8s_CLUSTER, K8S_NODE, k8s_NAMESPACE, k8s_DEPLOYMENT, k8s_POD, and k8s_CONTAINER.

• Why it Matters: Beyond basic CPU and memory limits, the schema collects critical stability indicators like Mem|Total OOM Events for pods and net|TopNReceivePacketsDrop for nodes and namespaces. By mapping these modern workloads onto the underlying infrastructure, SREs can correlate a pod's network drop directly to the underlying ESXi host or vSphere network folder performance.

Driving AIOps and Full-Stack Observability Use Cases

By bringingVCFOps data into DX O2, infrastructure and operations teams unlock several transformative use cases:

1. Unified Cross-Domain Visibility: Stop pivoting between isolated VMware management consoles and overarching APM platforms. By natively ingesting entities ranging from the foundational VCF_WORLD to granular k8s_CONTAINER deployments, SREs can work from  a single pane of glass to understand  the entire private cloud stack.

2. Intelligent Alarm Correlation: Because VCF alarms are fetched and directly correlated with known entity IDs within DX O2, the AIOps engine can seamlessly connect infrastructure alerts to the application components impacted by the outage. This reduces alert noise and accelerates root-cause analysis.

3. Proactive Capacity & Health Management: Using the ingested metric streams and resource data, operations teams can leverage DX O2’s predictive insights to forecast capacity bottlenecks on VCF Datastores or Cluster Compute Resources before they impact end-user experience.

Get Started

If you are running workloads on VCF, integrating VCFOps with DX O2 is a game-changing step toward achieving true full-stack observability and reducing Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).

To deploy the connector and begin streaming your VCF telemetry, check out the official Broadcom TechDocs on integrating with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and configuring the ODC Collector.

• ODC Architecture

• VCF Operations Agent

• DX O2 26.5.1 Release Notes