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In-N-Out Monitoring Technology |
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The eG VM Monitor extends the eG Enterprise monitoring technology to virtual environments. Using a patent-pending In-N-Out MonitoringTM approach, the eG VM Monitor provides a comprehensive view of a Citrix XenServer, including the performance of the hypervisor, the control domain and all of its virtual machines. The monitoring can be done either using agents installed on the XenServers or using agentless monitors. When agent-based monitoring is used, eG agents only have to be installed on the Citrix XenServer -- not on individual guest VMs. Using XenServer APIs, the agents provide an “outside view” of a guest VM’s performance. The relative resource usage levels of the guest VMs show where the performance hogs exist. To complement the outside view, the eG agent obtains an “inside view” that details the user activity, resource allocation and the application mix running inside the VM guest operating system. All the capabilities of agent-based monitoring are also available with the agentless monitoring option for Citrix XenServers. The eG VM Monitor automatically baselines all the metrics it collects, so that IT administrators can be informed proactively of any deviations from the norm. No other virtualization monitoring solution offers this combination of features.
From a monitoring and management standpoint, the eG VM Monitor for Citrix XenServers goes well beyond managing virtualized servers as discrete entities. End-to-end business service views show the applications and network devices that support each business service, and the inter-dependencies among them. Applications are associated with the virtual machines they run on, and each virtual machine is mapped to the physical machine upon which it is hosted.
The dependency of the virtual machines to physical machines is determined dynamically, so as to support the Citrix XenMotion® technology. A patented root-cause diagnosis engine analyzes the service topology graphs and the virtual-to-physical machine mappings to pin-point where the problem areas in the infrastructure lie. |
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Monitoring and Reporting of Citrix XenServers: Using a custom monitoring model for Citrix XenServers, the eG VM Monitor correlates performance across the host and guest VMs. Extensive pre-built reports enable rapid identification of bottlenecks and streamline capacity planning. |
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Multi-tier IT infrastructures are a nightmare to troubleshoot because of the dependencies that exist between application tiers. For instance, a failure in the database tier could result in slow downs in the application and web server tiers. Hence, monitoring solutions that view the infrastructure as independent silos cannot effectively monitor and diagnose problems in such infrastructures. The addition of virtualization to such infrastructures makes monitoring and management of these infrastructures even more challenging!
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Fig 1: A problem in one application can affect all the other applications involved in the service delivery. |
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Fig 2: Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses |
Since a single VMware® ESX/ESXi Server is used to host multiple virtual machines (VMs), a single malfunctioning application on a VM can degrade the performance seen by applications hosted on the other VMs. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate such an example. In this scenario, users are experiencing slowness in their access to a web-based service. From the service topology, it is clear that the database server is the cause of the slowdown. Figure 2 illustrates that since the database server is hosted on the same ESX/ESXi server as a media server, high I/O activity due to increased access to the media server is resulting in the database server seeing slow disk accesses. To accurately diagnose the problem in this example, a monitoring solution must not only consider the inter-dependencies between applications that are involved in service delivery, but it must also consider the existential relationships between applications, virtual machines, and physical machines. Besides resource contention among guest virtual machines, applications executing on the ESX/ESXi service console can also affect the performance of the virtual infrastructure.
While knowing which VM is consuming excessive resources is helpful, it is even more important to understand whether the VM's behavior is normal. For instance, a memory leak in one of the applications executing inside a VM may be causing the VM's memory usage to increase over time. In such cases, it is essential that the monitoring solution be able to look in-depth into each guest VM and detect abnormalities. While deploying individual agents inside each VM provides this level of visibility, this can result in additional resource overhead, licensing fees, and maintenance cost.
Performance degradations in a virtual infrastructure may also be because a virtual machine has not been configured with sufficient resources to handle its workload. A monitoring solution must be able to differentiate problems resulting from inadequate virtual machine configuration and those resulting from hot-spots created by uneven distribution of load across ESX/ESXi servers. |
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