Virtualization Monitoring Tool

What is virtualization monitoring?

Virtualization performance monitoring is the process of ensuring virtual environments and their infrastructures are performing at the highest capacity and using resources effectively. When done routinely, following virtualization monitoring best practices can help eliminate or prevent bottlenecks, mitigate security risks, and keep a virtual environment running smoothly. 

Virtualization monitoring can also be thought of as a three-pronged approach to ensuring the health of your VMware^® vSphere, Nutanix^® AHV or Microsoft^® Hyper-V environment.

1. The first prong is monitoring. This encompasses everything from basic health status to isolating problematic signals.
2. The second prong, troubleshooting, begins when something on your network—VM, device, application—isn’t performing as expected, meaning it’s time to start the remediation process.
3. Finally, reporting helps build a repertoire of specialized knowledge you can use to expedite decision making. Reporting also facilitates compliance with critical standards and regulations. 

You may also hear about specific types of virtualization monitoring. For instance, SQL Server virtualization monitoring refers to a subset of virtualization monitoring specific to Windows SQL Server 2012 and later versions.

How does virtualization monitoring work?

Virtualization monitoring, either manually or with the help of virtualization monitoring tools, works by monitoring a virtual environment for the following factors:

• All performance-related events including issues, disruptions, and reports culled from previous instances of virtual machine performance management
• Virtualization security or control issues
• VM configurations, health status, and all relevant metrics of virtual machines on a host, down to the most granular level
• User/application activity

Virtualization monitoring is different from traditional network monitoring or monitoring a physical computing system because there’s no inherent one-to-one relationship between the operating system and the server. At any given time, there could be multiple virtual machines with their own separate operating systems and workloads running on a single host and sharing its resources. 

Without virtualization monitoring, it can be difficult for IT administrators to accurately understand the relationship between VMs and their underlying hardware, especially when they’re trying to monitor many VMs across a network. It’s a good idea to ask and solve for these questions when building a virtualization monitoring strategy:

• What is the most efficient way to monitor?
• What do you consider a performance problem?
• What do you want to be able to do once a problem is identified?
• How will reporting and capacity planning factor into your monitoring practices?

Why is virtualization monitoring important?

Virtual environments come with their own challenges only effective virtualization performance monitoring can help alleviate. If one VM is idle and draining resources, then all other VMs on the host can be negatively affected.

Virtualization monitoring is important for ensuring performance issues are resolved quickly or can help avoid them altogether. Effective monitoring can also allow admins to perform capacity planning, which means they can look ahead to see whether current resource usage is adequate, whether more capacity should be added for future growth, and whether current resources could be reallocated for a more efficient system. With monitoring, admins not only can help ensure effective VM performance (and uninterrupted business productivity), but also potentially save the business money through effective resource use.

What does virtualization monitoring software do?

Depending on the size and complexity of your system, you might think this would be an easy task, but as environments get larger and performance issues compound to create more serious bottlenecks, even an experienced IT professional would quickly find themselves overwhelmed and ill-equipped.

Virtualization monitoring software is built to take some of the burdens of manual server virtualization monitoring by automating many of the most time-consuming and laborious processes. Virtualization management software can also help streamline operations by automatically reallocating resources, which enables quicker resolutions of performance issues.

Key performance indicators monitored by virtualization monitoring tools include:

• Virtual machines
• Data centers both on-premises and in the cloud
• Clusters
• Hosts

Virtualization monitoring tools should also feature a unified dashboard or interface, automated reporting, specialized tools for unique issues affecting virtual machines, and more.

How does virtualization monitoring work in Virtualization Manager?

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is designed to help IT administrators take control of their VMware, AHV, Hyper-V, or SQL Server environment by providing comprehensive virtualization monitoring.

Intuitive dashboards and various tools specifically designed to elevate vSAN are built to provide unparalleled visibility into your virtual environment and its performance. You can also use VMAN to dig deeper to find out how well your environment is connecting with the other applications and servers on your system. Capacity planning is easy when you have built-in tools recommending ways to use system resources more effectively. VMAN modeling scenarios can also help you better understand whether adding VMs or applications will affect your environment.

VMAN is also designed to provide outage alerts to help you stay on top of troubleshooting needs and identify the relationships between servers and objects to better inform your troubleshooting. With Virtualization Manager, you’re well-equipped to keep your virtual environment running smoothly.