25. 06. 2014 Juergen Vigna NetEye

NetEye: Monitoring VMware vSphere performance using alarms

Monitoring a company’s virtual machines and hosts is essential to ensure high performance at all times. To monitor VMware VSphere, an appropriate benchmarking combined with alarm-based actions is required to avoid that the administrator misses the existence of possible performance issues or lack of capacity. Thanks to the well-running NetEye SNMP Trap Eventhandler, NetEye users can immediately benefit from the features provided by vCenter Server.

In the following, I’ll briefly introduce you to the usage of alarms and their visualization within NetEye.
You can attach alarms to just about any object within vCenter Server. They keep you up to date about potential performance concerns and resource usage. You can create alarms for virtual machines, hosts, networks, and datastores based on predefined triggers provided with vCenter Server. Depending upon the object, these alarms can monitor resource consumption or the state of the object and alert you when certain conditions are met, such as high CPU usage. VMware vSphere sends the corresponding notification (SNMP Trap) to NetEye.
Once NetEye received the SNMP Trap it displays the alarm within the Message Console.

Notifications via e-mail to different contacts are possible.

Within NetEye you can also choose how to react to different alarms. So, a predefined action could automatically run a script or provide other means to correct the detected problem. An example could be high CPU usage; in this case, you may define an automatic transfer to another cluster.
There exists a large variety of predefined (in most cases very generic) alarms, but VMware enables you to create your own alarms to meet your individual demands. It is possible to create alarms at the datacenter level, the cluster level, the host level, or even the virtual machine level. This allows you to create specific alarms that are limited in scope and are intended to meet your specific monitoring needs.
If you want to know more about how to create different types of alarms, I would strongly suggest you to read Scott Lowe’s article about Monitoring VMware vSphere performance using alarms.

Juergen Vigna

Juergen Vigna

NetEye Solution Architect at Würth Phoenix
I have over 20 years of experience in the IT branch. After first experiences in the field of software development for public transport companies, I finally decided to join the young and growing team of Würth Phoenix. Initially, I was responsible for the internal Linux/Unix infrastructure and the management of CVS software. Afterwards, my main challenge was to establish the meanwhile well-known IT System Management Solution WÜRTHPHOENIX NetEye. As a Product Manager I started building NetEye from scratch, analyzing existing open source models, extending and finally joining them into one single powerful solution. After that, my job turned into a passion: Constant developments, customer installations and support became a matter of personal. Today I use my knowledge as a NetEye Senior Consultant as well as NetEye Solution Architect at Würth Phoenix.

Author

Juergen Vigna

I have over 20 years of experience in the IT branch. After first experiences in the field of software development for public transport companies, I finally decided to join the young and growing team of Würth Phoenix. Initially, I was responsible for the internal Linux/Unix infrastructure and the management of CVS software. Afterwards, my main challenge was to establish the meanwhile well-known IT System Management Solution WÜRTHPHOENIX NetEye. As a Product Manager I started building NetEye from scratch, analyzing existing open source models, extending and finally joining them into one single powerful solution. After that, my job turned into a passion: Constant developments, customer installations and support became a matter of personal. Today I use my knowledge as a NetEye Senior Consultant as well as NetEye Solution Architect at Würth Phoenix.

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