How to you Monitor your Environment?

[damccumb]

I have been exploring monitoring my 4.0 environment for a little while now and I am just curious how other people are doing it...

Are you monitoring each ESX server and pulling VM monitoring from host? are you monitoring each VM itself and the ESX servers are generic linux hosts? or Both?

Are you using vcenter performance monitoring/alerting?

Are you using open source tools like cacti or nagios to monitor? How deep are you monitoring with them? snmp? traps? ssh scripts? pings?

Are you using third party tool to monitor ESX with VM's? If so what are you using?

I had a pretty good cacti environment when I was on ESX 3.5 and then all my graphs broke when we upgraded. Let me know. Just trying to figure out a direction to go here with vsphere monitoring. Thanks

PS I wanted to through a plug for ESXi too.. how are you guys tackling those as well..

-Dave

[AntonVZhbankov]

I'm using Veeam Monitor.

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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[osha]

In order to monitor the performance of your vmware infratructure you can use the performance tab from the Vcenter server (you can monitor ESX's, choose specific VM's or even create a stacked graph containing the all the VM's on an ESX). You can also use other tools.

I've evaluated some products for the performance monitoring of ESX servers, these are:

- VEEAM: i think its very simple and contains metrics for monitoring Cpu, memory,disk and network.

You can use it to monitor the overall perfromance of the ESX/ESXi server or to monitor the performance of individual machines. It can also be used to created scheduled web reports containg preconfigured durations (days, weeks, months,...). Also you can create reports to monitor the trends.

- TeamQuest: its very rich in its metrics and can provide you with very detailed metrics for the performance monitoring of virtual machines (you can also use other agents from TeamQuest to monitor phyical machines) it uses java to display its reports and you can change the types of graphs that you generate which is not available in VEEAM.

- Vkernel: its also used for the monitoring, but i didnt test it.

if you need any further information or you want to know the performance metrics provided by each tool i can provide it for you.

Thanks

[cchesley]

All of the solutions mentioned provide management and reporting for VMware environments.

We have 2 main solutions and many free ones, all of which focus on the analytics and not just the raw numbers . Here is what they are and what they do:

Capacity Analyzer: This measures CPU, Memory, Storage and Disk I/O for all hosts, VMs and resource pools. This is the only solution that will give you measurements of Disk I/O for NFS storage. The main problems this virtual appliance solves are: Where are my performance bottlenecks now (and how do i fix them), where will they be in the future and how many VMs can i safely add to my environment.

Optimization Pack: This is a collection of 4 apps that will help you optimize your environment, find wasted storage and get excellent reporting on your infrastructure. RightSizer is the app that will look at how much resources each Vm uses and then shows how much of those resources get used. WasteFinder will show you where you are wasting storage that can be used for new VMs. It is not uncommon to find 2 TB or more of space that is wasted. Inventory is the reporting app that will allow you to get detailed and customized reports for everything in your VMware environment.

Our free offerings are:

Capacity Modeler: This virtual appliance will all your to set up a safe "sandbox" where you can test additions,deletions and changes to your virtual environment.

SearchMyVM: This is a free Google style search for items of interest.

SnapshotMyvM: Is a documentation tools for configurations and performance data from your virtual machines.

CapacityView: This is a brand new management style overview of your virtual environment. This is a Windows desktop app that is small and lightweight.

All of these ca be found at: VKernel

Chris

http://www.vkernel.com

[simonlam]

Check out the eGInnovation VMware Monitoring Tool - http://www.eginnovations.com/web/vmware.htm

[joeshestak]

I am using MindArray IPM to monitor VMware. (http://www.mindarraysystems.com/vmware-performance-monitoring-tools.php)