The emergence of virtual environments in IT networking has presented a few challenges for IT admins. Virtual environments reduce the cost and complexity of managing hardware and software. At the same time, they often require IT admins to manage more real estate to ensure full visibility and quick resolutions of issues.
Increasingly common in modern IT infrastructures, virtual servers are software-defined servers that run on physical servers. Virtual server monitoring is now a key aspect of modern IT infrastructure management.
Virtual server monitoring is the process of observing the health and performance of virtual servers in real time. It involves tracking the virtual server's resource utilization, including CPU usage, memory usage, disk space, and network traffic.
Virtual server monitoring provides significant advantages for organizations today. Here are key details about some of these benefits:
Proactive issue detection and faster resolution: Using an efficient virtual server tracking tool enables non-stop monitoring of key metrics like CPU usage, memory usage, disk utilization, and network traffic. The tool raises an alert instantly when these metrics exceed preset thresholds, giving IT admins ample time to identify and resolve the issue before a possible network disruption. Moreover, when an issue is detected, all relevant and detailed information about the root cause is presented on a common console. The result is quicker reaction times between issue detection and resolution, considerably reducing downtimes and enabling seamless business operations.
Improved capacity planning: Critical insights into the capacity utilization status of all virtual servers and infrastructure components, helps IT professionals plan for the future, ensuring that the infrastructure capacity scales with business growth.
Resource optimization: Continuous analysis of virtual server performance metrics often enables an IT operations team to achieve performance improvements. This could involve optimizing server performance, adjusting virtual machine settings, balancing workloads, allocating virtual resources, or enhancing virtual machines.
Ensures compliance and security: Virtual server monitoring keeps constant tabs on the compliance of network components, potential vulnerabilities in infrastructure endpoints, and generates reports that can aid decision-making.
OpManager Plus, an integrated IT operations observability solution, provides numerous benefits for organizations that need to observe their virtual servers. Here, we'll discuss the top six benefits:
OpManager Plus simplifies the process of virtual server monitoring from start to finish. Begin with virtual performance monitoring utilizing automatic discovery by entering the server host name and credentials. After the discovering of all VMs, OpManager Plus tracks the performance, availability, and other parameters of the VMs using preconfigured performance monitors.
There’s more agility in allocating resources in a virtual server infrastructure compared to a physical server environment. Virtual server resources are often placed on standby by IT admins who are responsible for overseeing the resources diverted to meet infrastructure demands. But managing and allocating resources is more difficult in an infrastructure with countless virtual machines. IT admins must address what is called VM sprawl that can occur when a large amount of virtual machines on a network are not properly managed or controlled. The solution to VM sprawl begins with continuous monitoring of VMs so that IT admins can oversee the full lifecycle of virtual machines.
Capacity planning is the next challenge in an infrastructure. With all the critical performance metrics available, an IT admin can make informed decisions about whether to upgrade or purchase VM resources according to capacity demands. Capacity planning is a critical task but, if conducted improperly, can lead to inflated data that under or over inflates an organization's infrastructure needs and negatively impacts business operations for the short and long term. For example, an IT admin can overestimate infrastructure demands and decide to purchase more VM resources than the infrastructure actually needs, an expensive error. Or, an IT admin can underestimate infrastructure needs which can impact current business operations and hamper an organization's future growth plans.
To avoid these problems, IT admins should utilize a comprehensive IT operations management platform, like OpManager Plus that provides more than 100 reports for capacity planning. OpManager Plus enables an IT admin to obtain crucial data and analyze utilization trends, memory, performance, and network utilization. The growth patterns of critical metrics clearly signify whether an upgrade or new purchase is needed.
OpManager Plus ensures in-depth tracking of hypervisors through over 40 performance monitors including for CPU, memory, disk and network.
OpManager Plus provides more than 70 comprehensive performance reports that let you schedule or export as PDF, CSV, and XLS files. You can also easily generate custom Hyper-V performance reports and access them from anywhere, giving you a quick glimpse on the performance of your Hyper-V servers and VMs.
OpManager Plus enables you to monitor virtual devices in the network without installing any agents on them, using protocols like SNMP, WMI or CLI.
OpManager Plus instantly informs you of performance issues, fault, or downtime via SMS or email. This gives IT admins ample time to assess the situation and react to the problem accordingly. The IT admin can utilize OpManager Plus' workflows feature to quickly perform troubleshooting and remediation tasks.
OpManager Plus' observability capabilities can help organizations improve the performance and availability of virtual servers. By identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks early, organizations can prevent outages and improve the user experience. OpManager Plus can also help organizations save money on IT costs by optimizing resource allocation. Overall, OpManager Plus is a powerful observability solution that can help organizations gain a deep understanding of their virtual server infrastructure. This understanding can be used to improve performance, availability, and cost savings. Learn more about OpManager Plus