Entity Overview

What is an entity?

The entity is the fundamental and most atomic element in IPM. Entities allow IPM to group resources based on their function, correlation, and inter-dependencies. Entities are logical groupings of the physical and virtual components of your infrastructure and include all the infrastructure components monitored by IPM.

Entities can be linked to other entities. The IPM user can build groups of entities to display the end-to-end infrastructure of an application in a meaningful fashion in the IPM software.

All entities have associated metrics with built-in aggregation rules for each metric type. The metrics, which measure the data flow in the environment, are collected, accessed and analyzed through Entities. Data can be viewed in the context of hosts, arrays and applications, for example, the top 10 hosts in an application.

The IPM software is entity-centric. Entities are used to view topology, set alarm rules, create reports, and run analytics.

The Value of Entities

Entities provide visibility into the end-to-end infrastructure supporting your application. In the image below, we see two application-centric views of the infrastructure supporting an application: the VMware infrastructure and the fibre channel infrastructure.

Entities are also associated with collected metrics and use built-in aggregation rules to enable:

Please refer to the Virtana Infrastructure Performance Management User Guide for a list entity types that are included with a standard IPM Basic License. Entity types for optional (non-core) integrations are detailed in the relevant integration User Guide.