Hardware Monitoring of VMware Hosts

[JBSalisbury]

We are a medium-large size business with 23 VMware Hosts (Dell) and about 125 Virtual servers. I've searched and searched and can't really find a good piece of software to monitor my hosts. We have 2 main datacenters on WMware 5.5 and 6.0 (within a month).  What does everyone use for monitoring their hosts?  I'd like to get email updates/alerts on disk, cpu, mem, network, battery, etc. I've tested software from ManageEngine and a few others, but haven't really found something I like.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!  Thanks!

[RyanH84]

Hi,

An obvious choice (if you have the licensing) would be to use vRealize Operations Manager from VMware. This plugs into your vCenter and is able to offer a multitude of alerting and configuration which is highly customizable. The benefit is that this is built by VMware for VMware products and can give you some excellent insight into your environment.

If you are looking for something third party, then I have worked for organisations that use Icinga/Nagios and Solarwinds. Both worked well and can be good if you are trying to use one tool to monitor absolutely everything, especially if you are trying to manage a large heterogeneous infrastructure. With all monitoring products, it is about putting in the time to get everything right for your organization: alerts, emails, thresholds, etc. It is a work in progress but the benefits can be reaped if the time is put to configure them properly.

[mcguirwl]

You can deploy Dell's Server Administrator (Managed Node) installation on each VMware host and direct the hosts to send SNMP traps to a server configured to collect logs. We use Dell's OpenManage Essentials (installed on a VM) to monitor hardware related events from our Dell servers and send out email alerts as necessary. I've found that this method works pretty well and also has no cost associated with it.

[iiToby]

Hi JBSalisbury,

Paid Options:

1. vRealize Operations - vRealize Operations (vCOps, vROps), IT Operations Management | VMware Australia

2. Veeam ONE - Veeam ONE for VMware and Hyper-V

Free Options:

1. Nagios - Nagios - The Industry Standard in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

2. Zenoss - Zenoss Community - Open Source Network Monitoring and Systems Management</title> <meta name="descriptio…

The Paid for options work great out of the box, but if you invest the time and effort in Nagios or Zenoss they will be really good monitoring systems.

Important note with monitoring systems, they all require development find one which meets your needs and stick with it keep making iterative improvements.

Cheers

@iiToby