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monitoring

Zenoss Unveils Monitoring Solution For Applications Built On Cloud Foundry

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Zenoss, a provider of management software for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environments, has announced the availability of their monitoring solution for applications built on Cloud Foundry, the open platform as a service.

Available as a free, open source product, Zenoss’ monitoring solution for Cloud Foundry allows developers and operators of applications built on the Cloud Foundry platform to maintain real-time inventory, health and performance of their cloud-based applications and underlying components.

By bringing its automatic model-based monitoring approach to Cloud Foundry, Zenoss provides developers with an automated monitoring solution that automatically discovers configuration changes and keeps monitoring in sync with what’s deployed.

Zenoss can also drive scaling and reconfiguration in real-time based on performance and other state information.

Availability, event, configuration and performance information can be directly fed into Zenoss’ operations data warehouse for advanced historical trending and analysis.

Network Instruments Upgrades Observer Monitoring Platform, Supports Analysis Of Virtualized Environments

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Network Instruments announced today that its Observer monitoring platform now provides complete visibility and in-depth analysis of application performance and traffic within both virtualized and physical environments. The Observer platform is the first analysis solution to close this visibility gap and extend the power of real-time and retrospective network analysis to virtualized environments.

Observer’s expanded virtual monitoring capabilities go beyond traditional analysis tools which provide limited views of virtualized networks. Network teams using Observer can now access a complete, integrated view of virtual traffic traversing physical networks, between different virtual machine hosts, and between virtual machines on the same host. Further, all virtual traffic and communications flowing within the virtual machine host can be copied and sent to a GigaStor appliance for back-in-time analysis or the Observer Reporting Server for enterprise-wide performance reports.

Complete Performance Tracking
Central to any performance monitoring effort is the ability to monitor seamlessly across physical and virtualized environments. Using the Observer platform, organizations obtain enterprise-wide views of virtualized resources and performance within virtualized and physical environments.

Availability
The Network Instruments Virtual TAP is a key component within the expanded Observer virtualized offering. To obtain this functionality, a user installs a Network Instruments software probe into their VM host environment, where they can copy and send the data to their retrospective analysis device, analyzer console, or a third-party purpose-built device. Current maintenance customers gain these capabilities at no charge.

SolarWinds Debuts Free VM Monitoring Tool

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SolarWinds, provider of downloadable network management software has released a new free tool, SolarWinds VM Monitor, and an update to its flagship Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) that will allow IT professionals to take advantage of the key characteristics of SolarWinds’ solutions — enterprise-class performance combined with affordability, quick deployment and ease of use — to manage and monitor their virtual deployments.

SolarWinds VM Monitor delivers an intuitive, desktop dashboard that continuously monitors a VMware ESX server and the associated virtual machines by providing real-time monitoring of ESX health indicators.

The SolarWinds VM Monitor is free and available for download on the SolarWinds site. Orion NPM is available now and pricing starts at $2,475 (USD) for 100 monitored elements including first year maintenance. Orion NPM customers, currently under maintenance, get the 9.1 updates for free.

eG Innovations Adds XenServer and Sun LDoms Support to Its VM Monitor

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eG Innovations today announced that its eG VM Monitor now supports Citrix XenServer and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris Logical Domains (LDoms).

The enhancements are part of v4.2 of the company’s eG Enterprise Suite, which already supports VMware ESX and ESX 3i servers as well as Solaris Containers. The new software release also strengthens management of VMware environments. eG Enterprise agents can now be integrated directly within VMware’s Virtual Center. This greatly simplifies configuration of the monitoring for VMware server farms.

Also, the eG VM Monitor software now monitors the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager to provide an end-to-end view of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployment. A new VM Search capability makes it easier to track the status and performance of virtual machines (VMs) as they move from one physical server to another.

The eG Enterprise Suite monitors Citrix XenServers and Sun LDoms in much the same way it monitors VMware ESX servers. eG Enterprise v4.2 offers agent-based and agentless monitoring of CitrixXen server v4.0 and 4.1. For agent-based monitoring, an eG agent on the control domain of a XenServer monitors the hypervisor and all its virtual machines (VMs).
Administrators can also choose to monitor their XenServers without agents, with either a Linux or a Windows system being used to host the remote data collector. Citrix XenMotion activity is tracked to determine when, how often, why and where VMs migrate to.

eG Enterprise v4.2 provides many other improvements and new features. These include: tracking and reporting uptime of individual VMs, ability to share customized views and reports among all or specific administrators, allowing administrators to select a console display “skin” (color) of their choice, providing selectable alert modes (e.g., email and SMS) to accommodate preferences of administrators who work in shifts; and custom monitoring of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The eG Enterprise v4.2 will be available at the end of September. Pricing for any virtualization platform supported is per server monitored, regardless of the hardware capabilities (e.g., CPU, memory, socket) of the server, or the number of virtual machines or virtual desktops it supports. Pricing for a 25-node environment starts at $50,000.

Monitor Your Citrix XenServer Environment With Hyperic HQ

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Open source Web infrastructure management provider Hyperic today announced Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer management and monitoring software for Citrix XenServer. The new software allows XenServer administrators to quickly and correctly assess IT decisions within their XenServer environment.

“Our customers manage some of the world’s biggest Web environments where every second of downtime can mean losing revenue, users or both. Virtualization software such as Citrix XenServer delivers these organizations the necessary tools to be ultra-responsive to changes in user patterns and application performance,” said Doug MacEachern, CTO for Hyperic HQ. “By adding support for XenServer, we are once again taking the guesswork out of the management side of the equation. In providing management support for all virtualized and non-virtualized systems from one central location, we continue in our mission to make Web-based applications more manageable.”

Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer combines performance metrics, log data, configuration and security events in a single view correlated by time. These events can be used to link errors reported in the XenServer logs with other performance and health indicators elsewhere in the environment, generate alerts or trigger automated control actions to remediate the current problem. Additionally, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer allows users to suspend, shutdown, start and reboot directly from the HQ interface and record the action in the event history for future reference.

Currently, Hyperic HQ for Citrix XenServer is available on Hyperic’s community Hyperforge. Hyperic will incorporate this new plugin directly into the core distribution in the upcoming Hyperic HQ 4.0 release, due out later this summer.

Hyperic

Veeam Releases Monitor 3.0 Beta

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After releasing Backup 2.0 last week, Veeam has now announced that Veeam Monitor version 3.0 is now available in beta.  Its new features, detailed below, increase the product’s trend analysis and troubleshooting capabilities – equipping IT admins to proactively manage the performance and availability of their VMware infrastructure.

New features in Veeam Monitor 3.0 include:

  • Enterprise scalability and support for multiple VirtualCenters. Is your environment getting too large to be handled by a single VirtualCenter? Veeam Monitor can help. New performance optimization and a special monitoring mode allow for enterprise scalability and provide the ability to gather monitoring information from large VI deployments with multiple VirtualCenters – all from a single console.
  • Multiple new alarm sources. The following new alarm sources are available in Veeam Monitor version 3.0 for even more comprehensive monitoring and alerting:
  • Alarm modeling. No more being flooded with alerts, and no more waiting for weeks to find out that your alarm settings don’t work as intended. With Veeam Monitor 3.0, you can model and test your alarms instantly. Simply use the new Alarm Modeling feature to test your alarm settings against your event history from VirtualCenter for an immediate evaluation. The new Alarm Modeling feature allows you to easily establish better benchmarks and thresholds. Based on the modeling results, you can fine-tune the alarms in case it appears that you will receive too many false positive alarms, or missing something important.
  • Capacity planning and trend analysis. Veeam Monitor’s new Trend Reporting feature allows you to discover trends and do proactive capacity planning. Project how your virtual environment will grow over time; find out how resource usage is changing for a specified host, resource pool or datacenter; and plan upgrades or migrations based on what you learn.
  • Correlation of VI events and performance data. Ever wondered about an unexpected resource consumption spike? Solve resource usage mysteries with new real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graph.
  • Suppression of unwanted alarms. Tired of being slammed with alarms during backup activities? You can now instruct Veeam Monitor to suppress alerts raised during known VI activities, such as backup or snapshot operations.
  • Drill-down into VM. Want to research possible rogue VM activity? Veeam Monitor 3.0 provides you with the ability to drill down to an individual VM and find out what processes are running there, and how much CPU and memory they are consuming.
  • Connect to a VM directly from Veeam Monitor. Need to troubleshoot a VM that is not behaving as expected according to performance metrics? For your convenience, the Monitor 3.0 user interface features a new “Console” tab, which lets you connect to the VM console right from the Monitor interface.
  • Leverage VC history. No more waiting for monitoring data to be gathered before you can start working on it. When you connect to VirtualCenter for the first time, Veeam Monitor 3.0 fetches all historical performance and event data from it, giving you the ability to browse and analyze historical data immediately.

You can download the Beta of Veeam Monitor 3.0 here.

Veeam