Veeam Monitor

Overview:

Veeam Monitor is an easy to deploy, framework-independent solution for VMware ESX/ESXi performance monitoring that was created expressly to help you better manage the health and performance of your VMware Infrastructure (VI) environment. Veeam Monitor provides support for troubleshooting and issue resolution, as well as trend reporting and capacity planning - equipping you to proactively manage Virtual Infrastructure (VI) system health and performance today and over the long term

With Veeam Monitor, you can view both real-time and historical resource usage data for any virtual infrastructure object, as well as known infrastructure events, all on a single screen. This allows you to finally see your virtual infrastructure as a unified entity, not just a collection of isolated guests. Once you determine what is causing a specific performance issue, you can drill down into individual virtual machines, view their running processes, and even terminate some of the processes as needed – all from the Veeam Monitor interface. Or you can simply connect to the VM console to resolve the issue with the OS user interface – without leaving Veeam Monitor.

What’s New in Veeam Monitor 4.0:
 

vSphere Support

Veeam Monitor 4.0 is compatible with VMware vSphere 4. Whether you are already using vSphere, or just starting to evaluate it – you can put your vSphere vCenter under the Veeam Monitor umbrella, thanks to its ability to add multiple VI3 or vSphere vCenter servers, and even standalone ESX hosts, to a single monitoring pane.

Storage Monitoring

Veeam Monitor 4.0 introduces full storage monitoring capabilities including disk space, disk issues and datastore monitoring. The latter allows for viewing datastore load information aggregated from disk utilization statistics of all VMs and hosts using the specific datastore. This allows you to see the actual cumulative load on a particular datastore, and set up an alarm that is triggered when a datastore load is above the specified threshold. Datastore I/O monitoring is a unique Veeam Monitor feature not available from other VMware monitoring applications.

Hardware Monitoring

Veeam Monitor 4.0 can now monitor hardware sensor information through CIM/SMASH. This allows the VMware monitoring team to track physical hardware status (including ventilation, enclosure, power and other subsystem status) directly in Veeam Monitor. This eliminates the need for service-console-based hardware monitoring agents, which are not supported on ESXi servers. Alarms can also be used to send automatic e-mail notification or SNMP traps for a legacy SNMP monitoring framework; or to perform custom actions when hardware status changes.

Process Monitoring & Management

Veeam Monitor 4.0 provides the ability to drill down into individual Windows or Linux OS VMs to monitor the true performance metrics of running processes from inside a VM without having to open the VM console. Whether you run virtual server or VDI workloads, this capability allows you to easily find out how many resources a specific application is consuming, and even terminate some of the processes or restart some of the services as needed. This functionality is also supported for ESX and vCenter servers, allowing you to quickly fix unresponsive servers by shutting down misbehaving processes.

Scheduled Reporting

You can now automate the creation of periodic trend and capacity analysis reports. Multiple advanced options are available to help with automatic publishing of these reports to a file share, SharePoint library, or any other system via custom script options. Additionally, a new VM Uptime report has been added to allow tracking whether a specific VM meets its SLA levels.

Improved Performance

Based on feedback from large customers, the performance of the Veeam Monitor data collector has been tuned to be able to more reliably collect data from larger environments. Scalability improvements will be especially noticeable when Veeam Monitor is connected to vCenter 4.0. The Veeam Monitor client has also been improved to generate performance charts significantly faster.

Other Enhancements

Numerous additional enhancements requested by our customers are also included to make Veeam Monitor even easier and more convenient to use:

• New performance chart view mode. This mode allows you to show all the VMs under a selected VI object on a single performance chart, giving you the ability to conveniently compare performance and resource usage for multiple VMs.
   
• Improved security and single sign-on models. If a Veeam Monitor user account is added to the Veeam Monitor trusted group, that person can use Veeam Monitor without having to re-enter credentials for each ESX server or vCenter they want to drill down or connect to.
   
• “Lowest Load” statistics. Similar to the “Top Load” tab, this new tab allows you to quickly see the least loaded ESX hosts in your infrastructure, making it clear where to place additional VMs.
   
• New alarms. In addition to multiple new alarms around the new functionality discussed above, a new alarm has also been added for notifying on CPU Ready parameter.
   
• Remove all deleted VMs at once. You can now remove all deleted VMs from Veeam Monitor with a single click of the mouse, as opposed to removing them one by one as with the previous version.
   
• Other minor features include support for Windows 2008 and x64 bit operating systems, the ability to customize graph colors, support for unattended Veeam Monitor client setup, enhanced SMTP server compatibility and more.

Features and Benefits:

Business-centric monitoring

Veeam Monitor leverages Veeam Business View integration to enable performance monitoring, alerting, reporting and capacity planning for virtual machine groups based on criteria such as business unit, department, location, purpose, service level agreement and other. This ability to perform business-centric monitoring helps to identify the business impact of a virtual infrastructure’s performance and respond accordingly. It also allows you to create flexible alerts based on known server type characteristics and the potential business impact of an outage for more granular service-level management. You can also create targeted reports showing only the data relevant to specific business units, departments or types of server.

Virtual infrastructure performance analysis

Veeam Monitor shows comprehensive resource consumption and workload data, for hosts, clusters, and datastores, with visibility all the way down to the individual VM level and applications running inside of it. Find out at a glance which components of your VMware infrastructure are the largest resource consumers, and which ESX hosts are least loaded – right now and over time. View actual cumulative I/O load on a particular datastore to determine whether it is overloaded, or can handle more VMs. Drill-down into Windows and Linux VMs, ESX hosts and vCenter servers to monitor resource usage for specific applications. These capabilities speed up analysis and troubleshooting, and help you determine potential resource bottlenecks for both virtual server and VDI workloads.

Storage monitoring

Veeam Monitor 4.0 provides full storage monitoring capabilities, including disk space, disk issues and datastore monitoring. The latter allows for viewing datastore load information aggregated from disk utilization statistics of all VMs and hosts using the specific datastore. This allows you to see the actual cumulative load on a particular datastore, and set up an alarm that fires off when the datastore load is above a specified threshold. Datastore I/O monitoring is a unique Veeam Monitor feature not available from other VMware monitoring applications.

Hardware monitoring

To provide the most complete picture of your virtual datacenter, Veeam Monitor provides you with ESX server hardware sensor information. This allows the VMware monitoring team to track physical hardware status (including ventilation, enclosure, power and other subsystems status) directly in Veeam Monitor. This eliminates the need for service-console-based hardware monitoring agents, which are not supported on ESXi servers.

Capacity planning and trend analysis

All resource usage views support consumption trending and capacity planning, providing you with the historical data you need to proactively plan the growth and deployment of new virtual machines. Generate detailed graphical Excel or HTML performance and uptime reports for any period of time to review SLA for specific groups of virtual machines, analyze resource consumption trends and plan capacity, or to use this information for chargeback. Both manual and automatic report generation is supported, and options are provided to publish these reports to a file share, SharePoint library or other locations.

Advanced alerting and flexible alarms with modeling

Veeam Monitor provides comprehensive alerting with custom alarms that can be based on many sources. You can easily set up e-mail notifications or SNMP traps for important events such as a given number of running VMs is exceeded, host hardware status changes, a specific event is generated by vCenter, etc. Being alerted on such events allows for faster administrator response to critical issues, helping you maintain better health and uptime of your virtual infrastructure. The Alarm Modeling feature lets you quickly ensure that you have correctly set alarm benchmarks and thresholds by testing a newly created alarm using historical data.

Correlation of event and performance data

Veeam Monitor helps you understand how virtual infrastructure activities affect your VM performance, and solve resource usage mysteries with real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as VMotion, snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graphs.

Scalable architecture

Veeam Monitor is an enterprise-level application that enables multi-admin access to performance data without affecting ESX server or vCenter performance or changing your access policies. It gathers all performance information into a SQL Server database, allowing users to access infrastructure-wide performance data and reporting as needed.

Veeam Monitor is integrated with VMware vCenter to provide cluster-aware monitoring of your virtual machines. Veeam Monitor supports and extends VMware’s management framework, offloading the monitoring burden from vCenter for enhanced VC performance. And with support for multiple vCenters, Veeam Monitor shows performance data from your entire virtual infrastructure on a single screen – no matter how large your VMware deployment is.

System Requirements:

• VMware vSphere 4: ESX Server 4; vCenter Server 4.0
• VMware Infrastructure 3: ESX Server 3.x; VirtualCenter 2.x
• Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (Express Edition included), Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or later

Screenshots:

Click on a thumbnail to see that picture in full size!

Overall Business	Datastore	Hardware	Overall
Events	Processes

Documentation:

Veeam Monitor Datasheet (.PDF)