Introduction to Drift in Opscompass
Today I’m going to talk about the drift feature in Opscompass and why it is important to keep track of changes to your infrastructure.
Reviewing the dashboard for Opscompass, the top ribbon shows a brief summary of your inventory. In this example, we have Nutanix AHV, Oracle, and SQL Server as data sources. Opscompass is connecting to all of those data sources and continuously collecting metadata about all of the resources in those control planes. You can probably tell why it is important to keep track of all of this by looking at the big red number for Oracle.
On the left side, we see a summary of recent drift in our environment. That’s what we want to focus on today and show what high impact drift can mean to your environment.
Drilling Into the Oracle Cluster (NTX6)
Let’s drill down into the drift component of Opscompass, as well as some changes to virtual machines.
If we highlight the NTX6 cluster, which is our Oracle cluster, and explain the drift, we see that a virtual machine was removed from this cluster. That in itself is not all that interesting as virtual machines move around all the time in a hypervisor environment. However, this will become relevant as we continue to drill down.
Virtual Machine Change – System Prod Memory Increase
Next, let’s explore what happened to virtual machines. I’ll highlight the system prod virtual machine and explain that drift. We see that the memory has increased significantly for this VM.
While this can certainly have a high impact on your environment, it has no impact on our Oracle licensing, and we are trying to track down that $1.9 million license risk that Opscompass identified.
Application Prod Moved Clusters
Next, let’s look at what changed with application prod. We can see that this VM has changed clusters.
This is certainly a high impact change to our licensing posture, as we know that the NTX6 cluster is our production NDB database cluster, and we know that application prod is a production database VM. We’re honing in on the change that caused our license risk.
Exploring the Licenses Section
Now let’s drill down into our licenses. Opscompass is keeping track of our database licenses. It tracks entitlements as well as deployments.
Oracle License Compliance Status
Let’s take a look at our Oracle current state license compliance.
Looking at our compliance picture, if we sort by potential risk, we see that our database deployments exceed our licenses by a quantity of 16. With Oracle licensing, additional options and packs require a separate license. In our example, RAC, Advanced Security and Database Vault are all in use and out of compliance, along with Database Enterprise Edition.
Identifying the Source of License Risk
Let’s see if we can figure out what happened to cause this compliance problem.
If we enter license usage and click on Database Enterprise Edition, we can see that there are three Nutanix hosts with Oracle Database. Now we know that the application prod VM moved to the NTX3 cluster and is causing our Oracle license compliance problem.
Understanding the $1.9M Compliance Impact
We’ve shown today that the simple act of moving a virtual machine can have a big impact on your license compliance. This is what we refer to as high impact drift.
By continuously monitoring all of your resources, Opscompass alerts you to these high impact changes and can show you how to fix the problem. We refer to this as actionable intelligence. By merely migrating this virtual machine back to the cluster where it belongs, your $1.9 million compliance problem is solved. But knowing how to fix the problem is the hard part and Opscompass provides the solution.
