Virtualization Monitoring Tools !!

[Chhavi]

Hello All,

We are looking a monitoring tool for virtual environment in out company and I need you advise.

I have tested NWorks Management Pack (Veeam), Veeam Monitor/ Reporter, VKernel, PowerGUI and PowerWF and read about many others.

I want a tool that monitors the infrastructure including hardware in addition with performance & capacity.

Can anyone suggest the top 5 monitoring tools for virtual environment?

Regards,

Chhavi

[mittim12]

Not sure if it does hardware or not but the Hyper 9 demo I saw was very impressive. 

[ChrisDearden]

What level of hardware monitoring are you after ?

Its worth keeping an eye on the VMaline stuff from Integrien that VMware recently purchased.

The Xangati enterprise Dashboard is also great for the added levels it gets about the network traffic

[Chhavi]

I am actually looking at overall monitoring of the virtual environment with one tool or a combination of 2 if required.

I want to monitor performance, hardware & capacity to be resolve all level of issues:

- Reactive

- Proactive

- Capacity Management

I have already specified the tools that I am testing.

Is there anyone who wanted to have consolidated monitoring for virtual environment and figured out a way to do it? :smileyconfused:

All these tools have something good but they miss on some aspects as well especially integrating hardware monitoring.

Regards,

Chhavi

[ChrisDearden]

That single pane of glass is something many places are looking for.

If you have the time to deploy it then Microsoft SCOM with the Veeam Plugin is about as good as you can get for static alerting.

I like to refer to the 3 things you've listed as "whats broken now" , "whats going to brake" & "when do I need to buy more stuff"

I dont think there is a single tool on the market today that can do that ( this isn't to say there isn't stuff at a pre-production level that claims to be able to hit all 3 targets )

The problem with static alerting is that those thresholds are fixed. What might be good on a monday morning , might be bad on a friday afternoon.

How large an environment are you looking to monitor ?

[Chhavi]

Yes, we have SCOM in place for all the physical servers and other environments and I have Veeam NWorks MP installed on it for testing.

It looks good and monitors almost all day to day aspects of virtual environment. But I cannot customize it to give me additional information.

Perhaps ideal monitoring can be a combination of Veeam MP for daily monitoring and something else that is more flexible & interactive.

With Veeam MPs I miss on "what's going to brake" ( with manually creating reports & analyzing this can be done however I am looking for more automation) & "when do I need to buy more stuff". I agree that it might be the best for "what's broken now".

We have pretty large environment spread across Americas, Israel & India. We have around 345 hosts across all the datacenters and it will

keep growing by the day

[ChrisDearden]

Thats a good sized environment It sounds like having a single vision of your estate would be a key. What I would recommend is having a chat with the veeam guys - they may well be able to customise the better capacity planning reports for you ?

If you dont mind looking at a different tool - it might be worth evaluating the vkernel CMS suite - I found it can do that medium to long term kind of stuff as well.

long term forcasting does rely on some good data to start with so i'm not sure how much of an exact science it is ( as there are factors outside the technology to consider , ie drives from the business ot bring on new applications , so you would have ot link it to how the business itself grows ? )

[Chhavi]

Thanks Chris

We are evaluating it with Veeam already but I wanted to get a good understanding of some known tools myself.

Right now I'm looking at Veeam Monitor, Veeam MPs integrated in SCOM, VKernel and  VMTurbo monitoring part of my environment together.

They all are doing a good job in their own way but I want to boil down to at the most 2 of them if not one that I can then test with the vendors.

I get some important aspects sorted with these tools like IOPS of VMs and datastores, Storage, Host utilization, etc.

I don't really get the hardware check for hosts integrated in any and i think i'll have to live with it.

[ChrisDearden]

The thing is that the hardware monitoring depends on the CIM providers inside ESXi - unless you are using HP/Dell boxes that you can pull into their own hardware monitoring applications and exprot back out to SCOM , you are a bit out of luck.

[Chhavi]

Yes, we are using HP boxes and their own monitoring applications & SCOM is in place.

Our VMware admins still wanted the h/w information intergrated with the monitoring tool.

I think we can do without it and can rely on SCOM for that

Thanks Chris.. I'll update you all with the results of my testing with various tools available.

I'm sure it's going to help a lot of VMware admins out there !!

[Chhavi]

BTW.. I liked eG Enterprise demo.. waiting for them to provide me with the trial download

[VeraxSystems]

Try VMware plug-in for Verax NMS (http://www.veraxsystems.com/en/products/nms). Attached find a screenshot.