Take advantage of proactive monitoring of performance metrics specific to virtual environments and private clouds with VMware vSphere performance monitoring & management
VMware virtual infrastructures and private clouds have brought to light new challenges in performance management and monitoring. In order to manage your VMware vSphere environment effectively, you must now monitor pools of shared resources - memory, CPU, storage, and network resources – as well as every resource you monitored before. Shared resource contention makes root-cause analysis for workload and application performance issues even tougher.
VMware vSphere management tools from SolarWinds help you find your way through the labyrinth of virtualized resources in your VMware ESX (either vSphere or Virtual Infrastructure) environment. Award-winning SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a purpose-built virtualization management solution for your VMware (or VMware/Hyper-V) environment that helps you navigate the performance problems unique to virtual infrastructures and private clouds. Virtualization Manager gives you:
- Proactive performance monitoring to pinpoint common issues in VMware and private cloud environments
- Extensive storage input and output (I/O) analytics targeting storage contention in VMware environments
- Virtual dependency mapping to identify resource contention for application and workload troubleshooting
- Alerting, recommendations, integration, and ability to act on VMware performance problems
Manage performance problems unique to VMware environments with VMware vSphere performance analyzer
Virtualization Manager’s performance analyzer for VMware vSphere environments lets you drill down to troubleshoot performance problems in your VMware ESX virtual infrastructure or private cloud
- Proactively manage and monitor your virtual infrastructure’s health
- Guarantee meeting SLAs
- Manage VMware resource contention for memory, CPU, network, and storage
You also get extensive drill-down capability for deeper analysis:
- Plot and sort historical and current metrics for your VMware virtual infrastructure or private cloud-spanning object types and relationships (hosts in clusters, VMs on hosts, etc.)
- Plot metrics with similar units across multiple objects
- Create stack charts using drill-down graphs, giving you another level of detail
- Overlay alerts and other data onto charts for quicker resolution of problems
Here are a few examples of information the reporting in these functions displays:
- Aggregate I/O throughput for a datastore and its virtual machines that generate the most I/O
- Total VM I/O latency and its distribution across VMDK disks
- VMs that are causing CPU or memory resource contention on the physical host
Perform deep analysis of storage I/O issues unique to VMware virtual infrastructures and private cloud deployments with virtual storage I/O analyzer
Virtualized applications often use storage inefficiently and become bandwidth hogs, causing storage I/O contention, latency, and, worst of all, failures. These storage problems are some of the most common culprits found when addressing virtualization problems and finding them is sometimes the hardest part.
Virtualization management software from SolarWinds provides tons of critical functionality for your VMware virtual and private cloud environments:
- Storage I/O capacity and health monitoring and management
- Storage bottleneck visibility spanning iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC), and NFS environments
- A single pane of glass management view covering all shared storage
- Detailed storage metrics like latency, throughput, read/write, and IOPS across each object/level
- Granular tracking at VMDK and disk levels
- Cluster, host, VM, and datastore analysis
Identify and repair performance issues in your VMware environment with virtualization performance alerts
You need immediate notification with recommended actions when a performance issue occurs in your VMware vSphere environment. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager’s performance alerts allow you to receive proactive notification on your VMware environment’s health with specific recommendations and active links guiding you to the next steps.
At the core of Virtualization Manager is a powerful search engine that allows you to search, filter, and sort through configuration and performance data collected over time. This provides you with flexibility in the creation of alerts, dashboards, trends, reports, and other content types. Our virtualization management tools help you by:
- Providing alerts, recommendations, integration, and action on virtualization performance problems
- Creating customized alarms for your environment using Virtualization Manager’s search-based capabilities
- Supplying more than 40 out-of-the-box best practice alerts spanning performance, availability, and configuration
- Utilizing open API’s to simplify integration with workflow, orchestration, or auto-provisioning systems in your private cloud
- Integrating newly-discovered Virtual Machines with your existing management tools or service desk
- Providing PowerShell script integration for workflow and actions
Get instant insight into the capacity, performance, configuration, and usage of your virtual environment with virtualization dashboards
Tons of valuable virtualization dashboards are pre-configured and populated with common virtualization and private cloud management best practices. Several out-of-the-box VMware dashboards include:
- Administrator Dashboard: provides real-time performance data and alerts to resource contention among CPU, memory, and storage
- VM Sprawl Dashboard: shows stale/idle VMs, zombie VMs, orphaned files, and over-provisioned VMs
- Virtualization Capacity Dashboard: displays bottlenecks and trends in capacity
- Showback Dashboard: displays resource (CPU, memory and disk space) utilization across all resource pools configured and folders - usually representing lines of business, departments, projects, and other business-related groups
- Cloud Cost Estimator: projects the cost of running virtual machines in the public cloud (Amazon™ EC2)
Other dashboard functions in Virtualization Manager:
- Easy virtualization dashboard customization using a robust search functionality that allows you to search, filter, and sort configuration and performance characteristics; Provides excellent flexibility in the creation of dashboards, reports, alerts, trends, and other content
- Query builder facilitates the extension of community-contributed or out-of-the-box virtualization dashboards across searchable attributes
- Custom attributes can also be added to collected data in objects by using labels; these are searchable, allowing extensive grouping of objects (e.g. you can create a dashboard of objects grouped by VM owner)
- Ability to export dashboard widgets to a portal, thus simplifying the distribution of key live status information without requiring you to give access to VMware vCenter™ or install a client
Track changes over time and troubleshoot forensically for performance problem analysis with Time Travel and virtualization dependency mapping
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager uses cutting-edge virtualization dependency mapping functionality to contextualize one or multiple objects on a dependency map, enabling you to see all related objects. For instance, virtual dependency mapping allows you to see all of the virtual machines on a particular datastore and sort those VMs from highest to lowest based on storage I/O. For example, it can also display each of the datastores being used by a specific host.
SolarWinds’ management tools for VMware vSphere supply you with excellent features like:
Time Travel: A comprehensive historical record of relationships and configuration information, Time Travel lets you go back in time to see any historical dependencies that existed at a point in time
For instance, you can see:
- Every virtual machine that was on a specific datastore three days ago
- Which VMs were generating the most I/O at that time
- Data that helps you understand “what happened to this datastore over the weekend?” or “why was my VM running slow?”
Because VMware environments are very dynamic, virtualization dependency mapping and Time Travel help you track changes over time and perform problem analysis, forensic analysis, and troubleshooting in your VMware (ESX, vSphere, Virtual Infrastructure) environment.