Free XenServer Health Monitor Tool

Free XenServer Helath Monitor Tool – Documents

User Guide

Getting Started

ManageEngine Free XenServer Health Monitor is a lightweight and powerful, Windows-based tool that helps administrators in monitoring the performance/health of Citrix XenServer and the virtual machine instances deployed in that server.

Settings

Once installation is complete, it will automatically starts the application, otherwise go to Start --> All Programs --> ManageEngine Free XenServer Health Monitor --> Free XenServer Health Monitor

For the first time, it will take you to the settings screen, where you can enter connection and authentication details to make the connection to the XenServer host. Below are the details required for making the connection.

• Hostname / IPAddress --- IPAddress or dns name of the machine hosting XenServer
• Port --- port at which XenServer is listening, default is 80
• Username
• Password

Once the connection is successful, the tool fetches the following parameters and performance metrics and populates them in the dashboard. Below mentioned parameters and metrics of the host will be displayed, polling will happen periodically and the performance metrics will be refreshed in real time, at an interval of 30 seconds.

• Hostname
• IP Address
• Version
• UUID
• VM Count
• CPU Count
• CPU Utilization
• Memory Utilization
• Total Memory in MB
• Interface Count
• Network Tx/Rx rate in Mbps

Note : If the connection is not successful, appropriate error messages will be popped up.

The list of virtual machine instances running on the server will be listed in left side tree view, you can select any VM to see the details and performance metrics of that specific VM. Below mentioned parameters/performance metrics shown for the virtual machines.

• VM Name
• Status of the VM
• OS Name (If XenServer Tools are not Installed, it will be changed to Tools Status)
• CPU Utilization
• Memory Utilization
• Total Memory in MB
• Interface Count
• Network Tx/Rx rate in Mbps
• Disk Read/Write rate in KBps

Adding host for monitoring

To add another XenServer host for monitoring, click on the Settings Settings icon, it would take you to Settings window. Enter the required credentials, connect to the server and start monitoring.

Refresh

Clicking the Refresh icon would refresh the tool completely, (ie) all the XenServer hosts being monitored will be re-discovered and tree view will be updated with currently available list of virtual machines and all the virtual machines deleted/suspended will be removed from the tree view.

Delete

You can delete the host being monitored by just clicking on the Delete icon present at the right side of the host node in tree view. All the credentials of hosts being monitored will be persisted between restart of tool.

Threshold

Critical performance metrics like CPU and Memory Utilization are checked against various threshold levels internally and color of bar graphs of respective metric is changed accordingly. The details of the various threshold levels and mapped color representation is given below,

Note: From XenServer Version 5.5 and above, to get the performance metrics via this tool, you need to set the other-config:rrd_update_interval=<interval> parameter on the XenSever host to one of the following values, and restart the same.

The above mentioned configuration is mandatory as the way to access performance metrics on the XenServer has been changed from 5.5 onwards. Kindly refer chapter 5 of the XenServer Software Development kit, for more details regarding the above, in the link below,

http://support.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/20638-102-330351/sdk-1.0-5.5.0-en_gb.pdf

And also XenServer Tools must be installed in all the VM's you are interested in monitoring, then only you will be able to get the metrics(otherwise XenServer won't collect the performance metrics) for the VMs.