VMware server monitoring for free
First lets define what VMware monitoring is. Usually it is the process of constant tracking of the health of virtual machines inside a virtualized IT infrastructure using, of course, VMware software. The way you achieve this is by using tools provided by other software companies that allow you to monitor performance, configuration, capacity planning and chargeback. Those are the basic capabilities that you should be looking for when choosing a VMware monitoring solution. But what does a great VMware monitoring solution do? As I see it, it should do the following:
Provide a complete view of your entire virtual infrastructure with comprehensive workload data for hosts, clusters and datastores, as well as thorough resource consumption
All the information that you need should be available in summary dashboards so you don’t have to go around searching for the data that you need 5 minutes ago
Storage monitoring that takes care of disk space and issues
Provides ESX(i) host hardware information so you can track physical hardware as well as virtual
I think pre-defined alerts should be a given at this point, as well as customizable ones. Those are some of the main capabilities that I would like in a VMware monitoring solution. What would you like to see in your VMware server monitoring solution?











