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Private Cloud Monitoring

>WhatsUp Gold Provides Complete Coverage from Planning to Deployment

As a network manager or systems administrator, chances are you’re using virtualization as the basis to build your private cloud, or are at least planning to do so.

Assess Your Infrastructure

Before you plan what resources should be virtualized, you need to know what resources are in your infrastructure, including their interdependencies and how everything is connected down to the individual port.

WhatsUp Gold will automatically discover, map, inventory and document your infrastructure and port-to-port connectivity. If you have already virtualized some hardware assets, WhatsUp Gold will discover and map the physical to virtual associations for you.

WhatsUp Gold in the Cloud

Configure Basic Monitoring

Once you’ve discovered what you have in your infrastructure and how everything is connected, it’s time to start monitoring for the cloud. This information will help to identify under-utilized resources that can be moved to the cloud.

  • Networking Devices: Key metrics such as interface utilization, interface errors and discards, CPU and Memory utilization
  • Systems, servers and workstations: Processor utilization, memory, processes, storage and file system, as well as disk I/O
  • Hardware Performance Indicators: Temperate, power supply and fans — quickly to track for instances of overheating or component failures

Establish Early Baselines

A traffic baseline should be a standard part of your datacenter consolidation/virtualization predeployment plans. With this data, you can compare network and bandwidth usage before and after moving to the cloud. This is the best way to ensure that end-user experience will not be negatively impacted.

  • Know which users, applications and protocols are consuming your bandwidth, and track QoS for all applications
  • Measure bandwidth usage, verify ISP providers billing, and plan for spikes in usage to avoid dropped packets or delays
  • Track traffic anomalies to help you detect the introduction of viruses and worms into the corporate network

Managing Your Private Cloud

If you are already in the cloud, there is a new set of management challenges to consider, such as how to:

  • Discover and document both physical and virtualized resources and associations
  • Maintain an accurate physical-to-VM mapping at all times
  • Ensure that applications perform at optimal pre-virtualization levels
  • Integrate alerting, escalation and response procedures across virtual and physical resources
  • Rapidly locate the root cause of a performance problem

Focus on the Virtual Environment

One of the greatest strengths of virtualization is the ease with which IT administrators can create, copy, and dispose of new virtual machines (VMs) at a moment’s notice.

While this flexibility lets you maximize your hardware resources, without the right maps to visualize physical to virtual associations, it can hinder troubleshooting efforts and increase MTTR (mean time to resolution). Plus virtual sprawl, or the rapid proliferation of unmanaged VMs in your environment, can become a problem too.

Monitoring Virtual Resources

WhatsUp Gold’s WhatsVirtual plug-in integrates with the VMware API to collect performance metrics across VMs, virtual clusters and hosts, and oversee VMware vMotion or high availability live migrations. In addition, it can control virtual machines and virtual clusters through a number of management actions such as: power on, power off, lockdown, suspend, reset, and virtual machine backup from a single console to save time.

What you should monitor:

  • Resources (VM, cluster and host levels): monitor CPU, Interface, Memory, and disk utilization on the host level (to protect yourself against snapshots growing to the limit of your volume)
  • vCenter events: Security-centric events (such account creation/deletion, access to a host) as well as generic errors such as migration errors, clusters being overcommitted, insufficient failover resources, or general VM errors.