Monitoring Virtual Machines

From a security standpoint, a virtualized environment faces more risks than a physical environment: centralizing multiple applications on a single box creates a single point of failure, both for the physical server itself, and in its network connection. When a virtualized server crashes, or its network connection slows or breaks, it impacts all the applications on that server. PRTG Network Monitor provides vital information for planning, testing and monitoring virtualized environments. It comes with specially-designed sensors for VMware, hyper-V, ESX and XEN server monitoring, that can be easily deployed.

The XEN virtual machine monitor provides the comprehensive real-time monitoring necessary to ensure the reliability and stability of virtual environments: the PRTG availability monitoring tools  provide continuous collection and analysis of network data across virtualized applications and servers.

How Can PRTG Be Used to Monitor Virtual Machines?

Even before starting a virtualization project, it is essential to identify the CPU and memory load, available disk space and network capacity requirements of the applications to be included in the virtual infrastructure. PRTG Network Monitor can provide this data, allowing administrators to assess the impact virtual machines will have on their physical servers. This way, the server monitoring software avoids server overloads and unexpected outages.

Once the virtualization has started, it is important to monitor the virtual machine to identify and assess the current and expected resource load on each network connection or host server, based on historic usage data, to prevent proliferation of too many virtual machines on a single host server, which could result in a system crash. Monitoring load is easy with PRTG, which can show CPU (percent) and memory (absolute) usage, disks read and write speed, and network received and transmitted speed of a single virtual machine.

Customizable thresholds may be set to restrict utilization to 75 percent, for example, and an automatic alert can be configured to notify administrators when the threshold has been reached. To this end, PRTG offers a variety of different alerting options (SMS, email, send SNMP traps or syslog messages, execute an external programme, play a sound etc.).

Can PRTG be used to monitor a Software Defined Network?

PRTG Network Monitor

Paessler's tool for monitoring virtual machines, PRTG, is available in two editions. For basic packet capture and as an uptime monitor, the freeware may be downloaded and used for personal and commercial use completely free of charge. Need more sensors to monitor a larger IT infrastructure? See our commercial licenses here.