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VMware virtual server technologies provide companies with the ability to do more with less resources. While this technology makes computing easier and efficient, virtualization makes IT infrastructures harder to monitor and manage. Effective monitoring and management is critical for these environments to be adequate replacements for traditional hardware-based infrastructures.
The eG Monitor for VMware® InfrastructuresTM (the eG VM MonitorTM), part of the eG Enterprise Suite, is a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing all aspects of virtual hosts and guests, whether the infrastructure is used to support server or desktop applications. Coupled with the ability of the eG Enterprise Suite to monitor over 80 applications, including Citrix, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and others, the eG VM Monitor - with its patent-pending In-N-Out MonitoringTM technology -- provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for monitoring and managing the performance of virtual IT infrastructures.
Administrators can use the eG VM Monitor to monitor the performance of their physical and virtual infrastructures, troubleshoot problems to determine where the root-cause lies, assess where capacity bottlenecks are, and plan the usage of their servers and applications to optimize the utilization of the physical and virtual resources. The key customer benefits of this solution include higher uptime, better end-to-end performance, and operational cost savings through more effective utilization of key IT staff. |
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® vSphere/ESX 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 vSphere/ESX 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 vSphere/ESX 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 vSphere/ESX servers. |
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 an vSphere/ESX Server, including the performance of the VM kernel, the service console and all of its virtual machines. Agent-based monitoring can be used for ESX servers, while agentless monitoring can be used for ESXi servers. When agent-based monitoring is used, eG agents only have to be installed on the vSphere/ESX server -- not on individual guests. Using vSphere/ESX server 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 VMware vSphere/ESX servers. 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.
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Monitoring VM guests: eG agents track the performance of each guest VM relative to shared infrastructure resources (outside view) as well as the workload and application mix of the individual guest VMs (inside view). |
From a monitoring and management standpoint, the eG monitor for VMware infrastructures 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 VMware VMotion® Live Migration technology. A patented root-cause diagnosis engine analyzes the service topology graphs and the virtual-to-physical machine mappings to pin-point where the problems areas in the infrastructure lie.
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Monitoring and Reporting of vSphere/ESX servers: Using a custom vSphere/ESX Server model, 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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| vSphere/ESX Host Monitoring |
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What is the CPU load on the vSphere/ESX kernel, on the console, and each of the virtual guests? |
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What is the free memory in the vSphere/ESX kernel and the console? |
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Which network interfaces are seeing the most traffic? |
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Which storage devices are seeing high activity? |
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How much free space is available on each of the disk partitions? |
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Are there processes on the console VM that are taking up excessive resources? |
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| Virtual Guests Monitoring |
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How many virtual guest machines are running? What are their IP addresses/host names and operating systems? |
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What portion of the vSphere/ESX Server’s CPU is used by each guest? |
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Are there times when a guest is not getting CPU cycles; i.e., is the ready time too high? |
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How much of the memory allocated is a guest actively using? |
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Is the balloon driver enabled for a guest, and how much memory has it freed for each guest? |
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Which processes on a guest are taking up high disk, CPU or memory resources? |
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Is there excessive paging or memory thrashing in a guest? |
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Do all the disk partitions inside the guest operating system have adequate space? |
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Is there excessive queuing for disk access on any guest operating system? Which applications could be causing these accesses? |
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| Virtual Desktop Monitoring |
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How many desktops are powered on simultaneously on the vSphere/ESX Server? |
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Which users are logged on and when did each user login? |
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How much CPU, memory, disk and network resources is each desktop taking? |
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What is the typical duration of a user session? |
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Who has the peak usage times? |
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What applications are running on each desktop? |
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| VMotion Monitoring |
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Which vSphere/ESX Server is a virtual guest running on? |
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When was a guest moved from an vSphere/ESX Server? Which vSphere/ESX Server was the guest moved to? |
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Why was the guest migrated? What activities on the vSphere/ESX host caused the migration? |
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| Combined external and an internal views of VMware vSphere/ESX servers |
Real-time performance views of what the VMware host sees about the guests and what the guests see internally. |
| Deep diagnostics for VMware servers |
With a few clicks, drill down to the exact processes causing a problem. |
| Automatic correlation of performance |
Analyze performance across layers of the VMware infrastructure - the VM host, between the host and the guests, and across VM guests. |
| In-depth VMware VDI monitoring |
Know which users logged in, when, what applications they accessed, what resources they used, etc. |
| Monitor virtual environments with service views - not as silos |
Correlate the performance across applications hosted in the VMware environments, discover VM dependencies, and identify performance bottlenecks. |
| Single agent licensing for VMware servers |
One agent monitors the VM kernel, console, and all the VM guests. |
| Compatible with VMware Live Migration |
Detect live migration of servers across vSphere/ESX guests, determine the efficiency of live migration. |
| Extensive Reporting |
Customizable executive and operations reports on every aspect of your vSphere/ESX servers. Identify bottlenecks in real-time, plan the capacity of your VMware server farm. |
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Is Your Monitoring System Cloud Ready?
Cloud computing offers the advantages of pay-per-use pricing and the ability to make computing resources available quickly when and where they are needed. As organizations begin to deploy business services using cloud computing resources, understanding how to monitor and manage these cloud-based services becomes critical.
Below are some key considerations in determining if your monitoring system is cloud-ready.
 Deployment agility : Just as the cloud's underlying infrastructure is agile, the monitoring system needs to be nimble and agile as well, to enable you to quickly turn on applications in the cloud, manage them and start delivering business-critical services. Also, deployment should be automated as much as possible to reduce human intervention, and should be a simple process taking a few minutes, not days or weeks.
Ubiquitous access : The monitoring system should be web-based so it is accessible from anywhere at any time. This way, monitoring can be done from within the enterprise as well as beyond the enterprise.
Ability to operate in a secure manner, within and across firewalls : Since a business service may include servers within the enterprise and other servers in the cloud, the monitoring system should have the capability to operate within enterprise networks and also across firewalls. Further, for high security, monitoring agents, if used, should not listen on any additional TCP ports. Where possible, all communication should be protected using industry standard encryption protocols. Many monitoring systems that use SNMP and other proprietary protocols do not meet this requirement.
Capability to monitor the performance of applications hosted in the cloud : The monitoring system should be able to measure the performance of applications, whether they reside in the enterprise or in the cloud. The metrics collected can serve as a benchmark for determining if there is a problem and what is causing it; e.g., is it due to an application within the enterprise, or one hosted in the cloud?
Capability to monitor remote desktops efficiently : Desktops as a service is one of the popular applications driving cloud computing. Desktop virtualization technologies allow the efficiency of dozens of desktops on a single physical server. A cloud monitoring solution should parallel that efficiency by allowing detailed monitoring inside each desktop without requiring a monitoring agent on each desktop.
Extensibility to support cloud provider APIs : When a performance bottleneck is detected, knowing what caused the problem is the first step in fixing it. Is the problem caused by a malfunctioning application, or did performance degrade because usage of the application in the cloud has exceeded the paid-for-usage limit? Each cloud provider offers a custom interface for monitoring the performance and usage of the cloud. The monitoring system should be easily extensible to support any cloud provider API in order to help isolate the root cause of performance issues.
End-to-end monitoring, with automated root cause analysis : Ultimately, all business users care about is whether their critical services are meeting customer expectations for service performance and, if not, why. This capability, it is essential for monitoring end-to-end across a multi-tiered infrastructure that can span public cloud, private cloud and intra-enterprise networks. The ability to monitor what is happening at every layer of every component in such an end-to-end IT infrastructure- and automatically isolate which layer of which component is the source of an anomaly-- goes to the purpose of the Event Management process as defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL): "to detect events, makes sense of them, and determine the appropriate control action."
Ability to deliver monitoring itself as a cloud-based service : The monitoring tool itself should be delivered as a cloud-based service, so it can be turned on and off as the business demands. Additionally, the cloud monitoring tool should be provisioned and decommissioned on a pay-per-use model.
Licensing flexibility : Cloud computing environments can be scaled as demand increases or decreases. The cloud monitoring system must be flexible in handling this. Furthermore, since the server sizing can also vary based on load, monitoring solutions that are licensed per physical or virtual CPU, core, socket, memory or the operating system being used are not practical for cloud environments. Look for a solution that is not licensed based on the underlying infrastructure but rather based on need and usage.
Monitoring Cloud Infrastructures Using eG Enterprise
Legacy monitoring solutions and frameworks struggle to deal with the new requirements that cloud infrastructures pose. These solutions are complex to install and configure and they have rigid licensing policies that are based on applications monitored and the number of CPUs, cores, sockets, etc. Being based on SNMP or other proprietary protocols, these solutions cannot handle the communication requirements that cloud-based services have.
Using the key considerations discussed above, the table below summarizes how eG Enterprise addresses all of the Cloud Ready monitoring needs:
| Deployment agility |
eG Enterprise agents can be deployed in minutes. A silent installation procedure can be used to install agents without any human intervention. The eG agent automatically discovers the major applications running on a server and begins detailed monitoring and reporting for each application. Furthermore, alerting thresholds are set automatically and vary dynamically to account for normal patterns, which reduces false alerts |
| Ubiquitous access |
A 100% web-based interface ensures that users can log-in from anywhere and monitor the health of their critical business services and its underlying infrastructure - whether based on a private cloud, a public cloud, or conventional enterprise infrastructure |
| Ability to operate within and beyond firewalls |
eG Enterprises uses a 100% web-based architecture. All communication between the agents and the manager are over HTTP/HTTPS. This means no firewall rules need to be changed or ports opened to allow management traffic to flow. The agents also do not listen on any TCP ports. |
| Capability to monitor performance of applications hosted in the cloud |
eG Enterprise includes the ability to monitor applications using both active and passive approaches. Out of the box, eG Enterprise supports over 120+ applications, including most popular web, database, middleware, messaging and other applications. |
| Capability to monitor remote desktops efficiently |
eG Enterprise's patented In-n-Out MonitoringTM technology tracks the top CPU- and memory-consuming processes in each virtual desktop without requiring an agent on the desktop. It is also possible to monitor both VDI and Citrix or Terminal Server users from the same single pane of glass |
| Extensibility to monitor cloud provider APIs |
The eG Integration Console can be used to extend eG Enterprise to monitor different cloud providers. |
| End-to-End monitoring with automated root cause analysis |
eG Enterprise was designed from the ground up to monitor multiple components across multiple domains, and automatically distinguish the cause of service-affecting problems from their effects. With its end-to-end view, eG Enterprise can rapidly pinpoint the root cause of response time problems from all angles, such as application malfunction, unusually high workload, the cloud provider not providing the requested resources, or improper provisioning of a cloud-hosted server. It automatically downgrades the severity of alerts that are not root cause issues, thus drastically reducing troubleshooting time. |
| Deliver monitoring as a cloud-based service |
eG Enterprise is available as a SaaS offering from eG Innovations and from other service provider partners. Customers can choose to turn monitoring on and off as their business needs dictate. |
| Licensing flexibility |
eG Enterprise's unique single agent licensing model offers unparalleled flexibility in deployment. A single agent license can be used to perform in depth layer model monitoring of one of over 120 different applications and the underlying VM and server it is running on regardless of the server's hardware capabilities, or the OSs running on it. A single agent can also be used to remotely monitor multiple VDs on multiple servers, or multiple network and storage devices. |
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