VI3 Monitoring - Who is the Best

[thickclouds]

There seem to be so many different companies out there now with their own flavor of VI3 environment monitoring. Who is using what? What is the best? Anyone care to weigh in?

[esiebert7625]

Really depends on what you want to spend, if you want free monitoring check out Nagios.

See this post...

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=657982&#657982

Fyi…if you find this post helpful, please award points using the Helpful/Correct buttons.

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Thanks, Eric

Visit my website: http://vmware-land.com

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[doubleH]

Vizioncore did a demo for me of ESXCharter and I was impressed. You could see what resources a VM could be using (CPU,Disk,RAM,etc) It really allowed you to drill down in to the details that Virtual Centre does not provide. I haven't used it in a production environment...yet....but liked what I saw in the demo.

[Curdasss]

I used a demo copy of esxCharter and it is pretty sweet. Lots of pretty graphs and charts. I havn't pitched it to my boss yet, other things higher on the list to get, but it does look very nice. I just use VC server, and esxtop.

[Rob_Bohmann1]

Its works great for looking at one or two hosts in real-time, but if you want to do continuous monitoring/perf data gathering of significant # of hosts, well all I can say nicely is we are struggling with this, and with exporting raw performance data to analyze with our own methods we use for non-vms.

[juchestyle]

This has got to be the number one thing we need from VMware in the next edition (With the exception of maybe backup abilities.)

Respectfully,

Matthew - who is late for a meeting!

[esiebert7625]

don't forget patch management!

[Rumple]

Patch management is taken care of.

Pretty spanky product for free.

http://www.vmts.net/VMTSPatchManager.htm

[buckethead]

There are a lot of options depending on requirements and budget. We have looked at many products both commercial and opensource based and haven't found one that 100% meets our needs.

Some of the commercial products that we have looked at our Charter, Virtugo, nworks and I am sure I am missing someone.

From the opensource world we have looked at Nagios, cacti, and unnoc.

We are still deciding what best meets our needs, but for the time being we are working on pulling the data out of Virtual Center and writing scripts to get our data. We are not finished with this yet. The hope is that this can hold us over till VMWare comes out with something better or brings back vmkusage.

We install HP Insight Managers on all the hosts and point them to SIM. All virtual machines get a monitoring agent just like our production boxes.

Of all the ones we tested I liked esx Charter the most, but at the time it wasn't quite what we needed yet, but if you look at their roadmap it will be pretty nice

[buckethead]

I also tried ToutVirtual and their product is pretty interesting. Especially if you use other products.

The only think I didn't like is in the version I tested you had to install agents on the virtual machines.

[thickclouds]

Charter does look pretty good... anyone hear if VMware is going to build this into their product eventually?

[jason_jks]

I've written a VI3 plugin from scratch for Unnoc.

It uses the VI Perl Toolkit for gathering the data and RRDTool for graphing it. It's open source, free and available for use. As of the latest version, it monitors and graphs the following:

Per VM and per ESX server:

\- Memory Usage

\- CPU Usage

\- Network Usage

\- Disk Access (I/O per LUN)

You can also configure it to graph host statistics via SNMP for each ESX and VirtualCenter server.

It probably doesn't stack up to the commercial products, but it's relatively easy to install and I have a Virtual Appliance available for download as well. I also have a relatively small number of VM's running (about 20) so I'm not sure how it would look with lots of ESX servers and hundreds of VM's.

Here's a working demo of it:

http://unnoc.org/demo/display.php?host=odysseus

Jason

[cperdereau]

nice job jason

[tsugliani]

I can confirm !

Using it on our platform, works quite well, and jason included some of my needs to his project

Just great

Downloading last version at the moment... (quite slow :'( )

I will send you an email after testing this version for a while, if i have some issues or ideas

[jason_jks]

Thanks, glad you're getting some use out of it

Definitely let me know if you have problems or any ideas on improving it.

Jason

[RobMokkink]

I also forward syslog messages to a central syslog server or other 3rd party syslog server and have email alerts etc.

[Borat_Sagdiev]

Platespin PowerRecon is a fantastic produt for long-term performance analysis. It offers extensive reporting capabilities, very granular views and hooks into PowerConvert for those organizations managing dynamic (P2I/P2P/V2V/etc...)systems. The downside of the product is that its perpetual licensing is very expensive. Licensing per server-day is reasonable, but is intended for consolidation or project measurements only.

[micromacromonke]

I am going to be looking at monitoring some ESX instances using CA's Unicenter system in the next few weeks so I will let you know how it goes. I'm a Unicenter architect by trade but I've not used their latest virtualisation monitoring tools yet so I am interested to know myself!

[thickclouds]

Interesting. Anyone ever use NetIQ.

[virtech]

HAve a look at www.nworks.com, requires you have HP openview