Zenoss has announced that it is now offering a free ZenPack for monitoring the performance of VMware ESX/ESXi servers. Similar to the Unix "Top" command, this ZenPack uses the VMware resxtop command to aggregate and alert on performance metrics in a single graphical view in order to provide administrators an expanded and deeper VMware ESX/ESXi monitoring experience. With this ZenPack, Zenoss is the first to enable proactive VMware management using esxtop.
VMware’s esxtop is a very powerful VMware administrator’s tool used to obtain a snapshot of the current server state. It not only provides metrics but give you visibility to issues such as disk latency, CPU contentions, memory over commits, etc. VMware administrators have until now used esxtop at the command line to access host server performance metrics.
Virtualization administrators, while enjoying the power of the esxtop command, have been looking for enhancements to help simplify and improve performance troubleshooting. Currently the command must be executed through the command line interface and provides no capability for reporting or alerting. Historical data analysis and graphing requires users to manually redirect data to a file for further offline analysis and charting.
The new ZenPack for esxtop enables the following:
• Performance metrics from ESX and ESXi servers are automatically captured, graphed, displayed, and continually updated in one graphical interface.
• Users can set thresholds and exception alerting based on performance metrics and events as they occur.
• Historical data is saved for in-depth root cause analysis.
“As we have been working with organizations to provide deep VMware monitoring capabilities, we saw some of our customers and community members using the esxtop command. Unfortunately, this tool was somewhat hidden and only available for power users. We are combining the strength and ease of use of Zenoss with the esxtop command to provide a simpler monitoring capability for VMware ESX environments,” said Simon Jakesch, Engineer at Zenoss. “With this free ZenPack, users can easily identify performance problems in their ESX and ESXi environment, and immediately take steps to resolve the issues before they affect the business. This capability will save administrator time and increase accessibility to a very powerful performance tool.”
ZenPacks are software extensions to Zenoss. The ZenPack for esxtop is free. For more information on how to download the ZenPack, visit the Zenoss blog. For a complete list of all the ZenPacks that are available, please visit: http://community.zenoss.org/community/zenpacks.
