My Quick Review of Veeam Monitor

rynardtspies: All I can say is another long day. Still in the office at 2.45am 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

News

Tuesday, 23 December 2008 16:33

I’ve had a quick play with Veeam Monitor for VMware Infrastructure 3 Free Edition. Veeam Monitor looks like a good product and should come in handy if you have lots of things in your VI to monitor. It is better than the performance monitors in VMware vCenter, but then again it doesn’t take much to beat vCenter’s performance counters in detail.

I’ve installed Veeam Monitor on a Windows Server 2003 box. The installation wizard will give you an option to choose an existing SQL Database Server or to install SQL Express locally. I opted to install it on an existing SQL server. If you’re going to run Veeam Monitor in a production environment, I think it will make more sense to go with this option as well. The installation then went on and automatically created a new database on my SQL server called “Monitor”, so no need to create a database before kicking off the installation.

At first glance, Veeam Monitor looks and feels like a professional application. The GUI is clean and not cluttered with an overload of information. The graphs are easy to read and understand.

Veeam Monitor allows you to add a standalone ESX Server or a VirtualCenter or “vCenter” to monitor. In my case, I pointed it to my vCenter Server and as expected, it pulled the entire VI configuration from the VC, complete with Datacenters, Clulsters, Hosts and Resource Pools.

Now, let’s look at the information it returns. For this article I’m only going to mention the information it returned for a single “Datacenter”, defined in my VC. However, Veeam Monitor will report at a Datacenter, cluster, host, resource pool and Virtual Machine level. When looking at a virtual machine level, Veeam monitor will allow you to access the VM’s console as well as the processes inside the VM’s Guest OS** (**However the processes feature is not included in the Free Edition).

So at the datacenter level, it will return the following sets of information: Summary, Overall, CPU, Memory, Networking, Disk, Swap, Tops, Alarms and Events.

Here’s what they'll all tell you:

The Summary tab provides:

Events Count The number of events logged for the Datacenter
Performance data period The time period that performance data are reported on

The Overall tab provides graphs for:
CPU Usage, Memory Consumed, Network Usage, Disk Usage and Swap Usage.

The CPU, Memory, Networking, Disk and Swap tabs provide information using 3D graphs (providing you selected 3D in the Veeam Monitor Client Options) on datacenter wide utilization. Much the same as vCenter does. It just looks a lot better and easier to read. As expected, you also have the option to select the counters that you would like to see for each graph.
Sorry that I’ve jumped past the CPU, Memory, Networking, Disk and Swap tabs without providing much detail, but it really is very similar to vCenter, at a datacenter level anyway. The Tops tab is the one I really liked. It displays the 3 Virtual Machines that are the top resource users for the last 5 minutes. They are showed as follows:

• Top CPU Users in Percentage
• Top Network Users in KBps
• Top Memory Users in MB
• Top Swap Users in MB
• Top Disk Users in KBps

The Alarms tab displays the alarms defined in VC for the selected VI object. It also shows a history of triggered alarms and gives you the option to create new alarms as well. Another function is to resolve a triggered alarm by adding a comment to the alarm. There’s also a button to clear triggered alarms when “Resolved, later than 1 day, later than 1 week, later than 1 month or all”.

Although I didn’t give an in-depth review of Veeam Monitor (Because I just don’t have all the time in the world right now), I do think it’s a good product.

Just note that there are a few features that are not available in the Free Edition. The ones I came across are:

• No Alarm Modelling
• No reporting
• Only 24 hours of history displayed
• No access to the Guest OS Processes running inside the VM.

All in all, as with Veeam FastSCP, Veeam has got my thumbs up for Veeam Monitor!

Here are some screen shots: