Author: Akash MJ, ManageEngine
Fluctuations in network usage within organisations can occasionally surge due to several factors. For instance, increased traffic might stem from activities such as large-scale promotional campaigns, sudden software updates or patches, escalated remote work demands, or even unforeseen security incidents. An article published by the Financial Express claims e-commerce order volumes spiked by 23% in 2023 during Black Friday sales on the Unicommerce platform.
To boost network resiliency and avoid network downtime during a spike in network usage, organisations need hyper scalability. This can be achieved by expanding their digital footprint across hybrid clouds, data centers, and virtual machines. But expanding your IT infrastructure across cloud environments can be tedious.
An efficient approach to hyperscale is to deploy virtual server machines in your enterprise network. However, effectively managing these virtual servers and host machines is not easy without a virtual server management software that monitors the critical metrics of different virtual servers.
Critical metrics that need to be monitored in a virtual server
Virtual environments comprise various components, such as virtual machines, host machines, data stores, and clusters, that demand continuous monitoring. Understanding and monitoring critical metrics in a virtual machine are essential for network admins to ensure optimal performance and troubleshoot issues in virtual machine (VM) environments.
Several critical metrics that should be monitored closely within a virtual server include:
- Memory ballooning: Used to optimise memory usage.
- VM health: Tracks the overall health status of the virtual machines.
- Memory swapping: Used to transfer memory pages to a critical VM.
- Data store availability: Ensures accessibility and availability of data stores.
- VM network connectivity: Monitors and maintains connectivity between VMs.
Challenges faced by network admins to monitor virtual machines
Virtualised environments often consist of numerous VMs across various hosts and platforms. Managing this complexity, ensuring seamless connectivity, and monitoring diverse VMs can be daunting. Here are some challenges network admins encounter when monitoring virtual machines:
VM Sprawl: VM sprawl refers to the uncontrolled proliferation of virtual machines in an IT environment. It’s caused by the rapid and unregulated creation of virtual machines, often resulting in an excess of underutilised virtual machines.
Resource allocation and optimisation: Balancing resources among VMs to prevent bottlenecks or resource shortages while optimising performance requires continuous monitoring and fine-tuning.
Zombie VMs: Zombie VMs are dormant or abandoned virtual machines that remain active within an IT infrastructure, consuming resources without fulfilling any purpose.
Tracking these instances, and managing their life cycle is an ongoing challenge for network admins. Incorporating a reliable virtual server management tool like ManagerEngine OpManager, helps network admins overcome challenges as this solution monitors virtual machines in their IT infrastructure with ease.
How OpManager helps monitor virtual servers seamlessly
OpManager, a comprehensive network management tool monitors virtual servers by providing a range of VM monitoring, and management features, ensuring smooth operations within virtualised environments. Here are some core features of OpManager’s VM monitoring capabilities:
Virtual server monitoring: OpManager supports real-time monitoring of VMs, hosts, and clusters for multiple virtualisation platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, and Citrix XenServer.
Hassle-free discovery: OpManager utilises IP addresses and VM credentials to easily discover VM hosts, virtual machines, data stores, and other components.
Visualisation of VMs: OpManager provides maps for host servers and VMs, enabling network admins to visualise VMs in their IT infrastructure and make informed decisions.
Resource utilisation: Providing insights into resource usage such as CPU, memory, disk, and network utilisation across virtual servers, OpManager enables proactive management that prevents bottlenecks such as VM sprawl, and zombie VMs.
Alerts and notifications: OpManager triggers threshold-based alerts when potential issues are found in virtual servers, ensuring network admins are promptly notified to address emerging problems.
Automation and remediation: OpManager, with the help of Workflow, supports automation for routine tasks such as powering off VMs when not in use, and allows for setting up automated remediation actions for specific issues identified within the virtual environment.
Learn more about how OpManager helps address your challenges in VM monitoring. With it’s ITOM suite of solutions, OpManager helps you monitor servers, applications, bandwidth, configurations, firewall, IP addresses and switch ports.
Want to know more about ManageEngine OpManager and the services it offers? Book a free demo with one of our solution experts today. Integrate OpManager in your IT environment to monitor your virtual servers hassle-free.
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