My google feed for the keywords "vmware" usually has a bunch of junk come through, but I saw this headline and got involved to start reading right away, Zenoss Announces Free Tool for VMware Power Users with Esxtop. That keyword stuck out again, Free. If you're not familiar with Zenoss, it's a great infrastructure monitoring and performance piece of software. The Zenoss Core is a free product, but has the option to pay for support and subscription. Zenoss has plugins called Zenpacks that give you insight into different types of infrastructure. These Zenpacks are built for specific pieces of hardware or software to get deeper monitoring.
Today, Zenoss announced a free Zenpack that does performance monitoring looking at ESXTOP statistics. From the description: The VMWare ESX Server ZenPack for Core allows you to monitor ESX hosts and guests via VMWares Esxtop utility. The ZenPack uses the resxtop command to gather performance information about VMware Infrastructure™ ESX™ servers. Hold your horses, there are a few prerequistes that need to be installed to get this feature working correctly if you are a current Zenoss user. You must have Zenoss v3.0, the OpenSSL dev package, the ZenPacks.zenoss.ZenossVirtualHostMonitor at version 2.3.5, and finally the VMware vSphere CLI is required for access to the resxtop command. You can find all the installation instructions at the 17.2 Prerequisites Page. If you are new to Zenoss, ESX Zenpack comes preinstalled with the latest release of Zenoss Core.
This is a straight copy paste from the article above and is the real reason why this is such a great tool, "With Zenoss's VMware ESX Server Zenpack, you get visibility into your ESX/ESXi server and you are also able to proactively manage it. A perfect example of this is over-provisioning of virtual CPUs; a condition that without esxtop is hard to diagnosis. With Zenoss, you can easily monitor resource contention issues and proactively alert before there is service impact."
Props to Duncan Epping, for helping Zenoss interpret all these statictics with his in depth ESXTOP article. I'm looking forward to testing out this product soon and hoping to give some feedback.
