Virtualization Performance Monitoring
Hyper-V and VMware performance monitoring is critical to ensure application performance. But monitoring must go beyond simple metric observation and actually drive to root cause and resolution of VM performance problems.
vOPS Server Performance Monitoring
Maintaining VM Performance Requires Analysis of Metrics Across Servers, Network and Storage
Monitoring a virtual environment is critical to maintaining performance and availability. Without adequate monitoring, VM performance problems can create havoc with applications. However, observing various metrics on graphs is not sufficient to avoid these problems. There are just too many VM system metrics within hosts, clusters, resource pools, VMs, network, and datastores to humanly monitor without some form of advanced analysis identifying issues within virtualized infrastructure and a way to visualize all VMs in an environment on a single screen.
Each VM requires the monitoring of 20 metrics at the resource pool, host, cluster, and data center level on a real time basis that evaluates system performance for servers, storage and network areas. For an environment of just 100 VMs, this would involve examining over 2000 metrics every 5 minutes to detect potential bottlenecks.
Smaller VM environments may find “eyeball” analytics of Microsoft Systems Center or vCenter utilization graphs to be sufficient to accomplish monitoring goals. However, as environments scale, this method starts to fail. What is required for these larger environments? Adequate monitoring of a larger virtual environment requires not only collecting the VM system metrics data, but also diagnosing the data, investigating various Systems Center and vCenter alerts, and then performing some manner of analysis to determine if there are VM performance problems and how to get to a resolution. This process must be accomplished in real time.
Specifically, to monitor, diagnose and resolve VM performance issues, data centers must:
- Process a high volume of data quickly into actionable information for virtualization administrators
- Analyze network and storage performance as well as virtualized server usage to isolate VM performance issues to particular infrastructure areas
- See through one or multiple Systems Center or vCenter alerts to discern the root cause of an issue
- Separate spurious Systems Center or vCenter alerts from genuine VM performance problems
- Highlight which VMs in an environment are suffering from poor performance in a quickly digestible format
- Prioritize VM performance problems for resolution
- Provide actionable recommendations to solve VM performance issues
- Provide for variable windows of analysis to exclude either particular environments, times or resources
Implementing a Hyper-V and VMware monitoring system that meets these needs in a scalable manner from hundreds to thousands of VMs provides for:
- Decreased troubleshooting time
- Reduced downtime
- Accelerated virtualization of mission-critical applications
vOPS Server Standard monitors, diagnoses, and resolves performance issues in virtual environments from hundreds to thousands of virtual machines. vOPS uses real time analysis of system metrics, Systems Center alerts and vCenter alerts to determine abnormal trends and root cause, impact, and resolution of immediate issues and can integrate these results into external applications such as issue ticketing systems. Learn more about vOPS Server Standard's performance monitoring here.
