VMware® Infrastructure 3 FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter 15. Monitoring Your System

Here are two important reasons why you should monitor any system:

• Proactive problem prevention: Proactive problem prevention revolves around capacity, security, and software problems.

• Estimation: Estimation allows you to make an educated guess as to the effect of a change, see the effect of a change, and capacity-plan for the future.

In the physical realm, you need to watch each and every machine. In the virtual realm, what you watch depends on what you're checking.

For example, you still need to check the logs of all your virtual machines on a machine-by-machine basis. Even if you centralize monitoring to accomplish this, you're still looking for software and security issues on a machine-by-machine basis. On the other hand, you can look at hardware on a cluster basis or an ESX host basis, depending on whether you're looking for resource utilization metrics or a failed piece of hardware.

In this chapter, we discuss the various ways to measure performance and create useful baselines.

Monitoring VMware Infrastructure 3

You can choose from several points of view when it comes to monitoring. You can look at the virtual machines for logs and utilization stats. You can look at the clusters and individual ESX hosts they run on. You can view usage by subsystem, such as network and storage. VirtualCenter and VMware Infrastructure Client (VIC) can aid in most monitoring tasks.

Monitoring metrics

Outside of checking the logs on your virtual machines — which does need ...