Application Monitoring Engineered for Virtualized Environments
While virtualization delivers a number of benefits, it also increases the rate of change and level of abstraction within your datacenter, bringing a host of new systems management challenges. For example, how do you:
- Starting from a VMware vSphere ESX hypervisor, drill into each its guest operating systems to see what’s happening inside?
- Definitively quantify virtualization’s impact on application performance?
- Monitor systems that have moved from one ESX instance to another with vMotion?
- Avoid generating false alarms from app instances running on VMs that have been intentionally powered down?
- Detect when application performance degradations are due to “noisy neighbors” – those VMs running on the same ESX host as your app, which consume more than their fair share of CPU, bandwidth, or memory?
- Demo video: Hyperic for VI Admins
- Related videos: Deep Dive: Hyperic for Monitoring Apps
- Related videos: 15 Pitfalls to Avoid When Monitoring Apps Running on Virtual Infrastructure
Hyperic addresses all these needs and more, since it is engineered to accommodate constant datacenter change and complexity.
Unified Virtualization Stack Visibility
Hyperic provides a unified, detailed view of performance across your entire virtualization stack, from the VMware vSphere ESX hypervisor through the guest operating system and guest applications and services. This gives you the insight to address key virtualization-specific challenges, such as drilling into the guest OS and apps to identify the cause of excessive CPU, memory, or disk utilization for a particular VM. Or conversely, to determine whether excessive VM density on an ESX instance is degrading application performance.
Virtualization Migration Assurance
Hyperic speeds your organization’s adoption of virtualization so you can more rapidly drive efficiencies and cost savings across the datacenter. Use Hyperic to definitely quantify virtualization’s impact on application performance by baselining critical performance metrics (which are only visible within the guest OS or app) for both physical and virtual infrastructure. By comparing baselines, you can determine the precise performance changes due to virtualization, if any, and appropriately modify configurations and capacity.
Auto-Discovery of Topologies
Virtualization introduces a high level of dynamic, constant change to your datacenter—and Hyperic keeps you on top of everything. Hyperic automatically discovers new instances of ESX, virtual machines, and guest operating systems plus their applications and services, and integrates it all into a unified topology so you can see which apps are running on which ESX instances. This eliminates reliance on chronically out-of-date CMDBs. Hyperic detects when VMs are moved from one ESX instance to another using vMotion, and adjusts topologies accordingly: no monitoring data is lost and there’s no need to recreate alerting workflows. Hyperic automatically adjusts guest monitoring parameters based on the specific guest OS and application configuration. This exceptional level of automation saves time and lets you monitor more servers than ever before.
Virtualized Environment Event Management
Hyperic’s event management features provide visibility into the log events reported for every virtual machine. Log events provide system awareness for performance data, configuration changes, and security action changes. These events can be used to generate alerts, or simply to correlate errors reported in the VMware logs with performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment.
Automated Problem Resolution
Hyperic lets you elastically scale application capacity up or down to accommodate fluctuations in user demand, and can automate common responses to application problems—such as reverting a virtual machine to a snapshot, restarting a virtual machine, and rebooting a guest operating system. These automated recovery actions help fulfill virtualization’s promise of greater operational efficiency, especially for companies with global customers in multiple time zones.
Virtualization-Aware Alerting
Hyperic can distinguish between when a guest operating system has crashed unintentionally, and when it has been intentionally powered down or suspended. This prevents false alarms that can occur, for instance, when after the usage of an application has declined and sys admins scale down the application’s virtual infrastructure. This enables sys admins to elastically scale their application infrastructure without triggering alert storms.
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