Back in April, we released our updated suite of VMware monitoring. We’ve had lots of great additions to the LogicMonitor platform recently and really wanted our VMware monitoring to take advantage of these new powerful features. We also took the opportunity to provide new coverage, updating existing VMware monitoring modules, as well as adding some new modules entirely. We’ve brought the power of automatically assigned properties to our VMware monitoring. This allows a completely new type of insight into your infrastructure, showing the relationship between objects. For example: when you get an alert on a VM you probably need to determine what cluster it belongs to. With our automatic property assignment you can determine this within LogicMonitor — no need to jump into vCenter and hunt down the VM by name. Or maybe you’re a managed service provider using VMware Orchestrator to provision and tag VMs for various clients. We now pull those tags in as properties as well so you can save yourself switching between LogicMonitor and Orchestrator or vSphere. In addition to greater insight, automatic properties are also useful for filtering and grouping monitored instances. If you’re an MSP running VMs for various customers in one cluster, you can sort your VMs by customer using your existing Orchestrator tags. Because they’re grouped by tag, you can quickly see which of your customers is affected when you get an alert.
We’ve also added some new monitoring coverage, such as the new HA Admission Control monitoring module, that will track available failover resources and check them against your configured reservation. If your full reservation isn’t available, we’ll alert you so you can be sure your critical VMs have their reserved resources and are able to boot. The VM ConfigSource is our newest addition. It pulls .vmx files — the text files that contain the virtual hardware configuration — from vSphere hosts. It’s a great way for your entire team to see the changes any one individual may have made to a VM’s configuration, and correlate that change to its health and performance data. And if that change happens to break something, you can download the original .vmx file right out of LogicMonitor to get things back on track.
However, there’s more to your infrastructure than VMware. If you’re not monitoring everything your applications depend on, you don’t really have comprehensive insight into your IT environment. vSphere’s performance monitor can tell you that a VM is experiencing high write latency, but it won’t tell you that the RAID volume underlying the Datastore experienced a drive failure and is rebuilding. The web server running on your VM might not be responsive, or your database server may be experiencing cache starvation, but vSphere can’t tell you any of this because it doesn’t have any insight into what’s going on inside your VMs — and it doesn’t care. If you are tasked with keeping applications up and responsive, your monitoring needs to span all the components and systems involved – otherwise your outage rate and time to repair will both be significantly worse. That’s where a tool that presents a unified view of your infrastructure and applications – like LogicMonitor – can make your job easier. (And the fact that it’s automated means it can discover your storage systems, web servers, database servers — and everything else in your operations infrastructure — and start monitoring them for you automatically — and maybe even let you leave work at a decent hour!).
If you’d like to know more about our VMware monitoring, what’s covered, or how it works, stop by our booth at VMworld 2017! I’ll be there representing the Monitoring Team and I look forward to see what prospects and customers are most interested in. Come geek out on monitoring with us!
