2 weeks ago I caught some heat for my post vCenter Operations And The Hype. Thank you to all the readers who submitted comments on going deeper into explanation.
As time progressed and I got my hands on more material, I found vCenter Operations to be more than just another monitoring tool. The real meat of the product is the trending capabilities it can offer. Being able to continually monitor the health of your virtual machines through intense algorithms is completely changing the game. Welcome two more contenders to the game, VKernel Performance Anaylzer and Xangati Health Engine.
Over the past two weeks I got some sneak peeks into these new products. As VKernel's Bryan Semple says, these new products aren't considered to be YAM (Yet Another Monitoring) tools. These new products integrate some very smart algorithms to analyze your environment over a period of time. These two new products are biting on the heels of vCenter Operations and may even have them beat in different areas.
All three products do a one thing in common. They all have a trending capability which allows you to deploy the product and over a period of a few hours or days and report back baselines of VM performance. Once a baseline has been created, any abnormalities are reported to the user interface.
VKernel Performance Anaylzer is part of their vOPS suite and can do capacity planning, optimization, and reporting such as the chart below shows.
The Xangati Health Engine is part of their new product line called the VDI Dashboard. One key component that sticks out is "In real-time – as an object’s health shifts – the health index changes to reflect the urgency of the performance issue. Moreover, the performance shift will trigger a real-time alert, which is uniquely paired with a DVR-recording." The DVR recording feature is something that is truly unique to Xangati and sets it apart. I really hope this new UI makes its way into the full blown Xangati product suite because there is a lot more information on the dashboard now. Xangati is very much network focused and people like me that come from a networking background will think this product rocks.
Take a look a the 3 different types of GUIs and how you will interface with them:
vCenter Operations
VKernel Performance Analyzer
Xangati VDI Dashboard
I will not touch on licensing because I have been told that vCenter Operations will be able to pick and choose VMs to monitor soon. This still isnt' as good as per core licensing because what if there is a VM you are not paying to monitor that is consuming more resources than it should? Take a look at VKernel or Xangati for per core licensing if you're looking to deploy something right away.