DX Unified Infrastructure Management

  • 1.  CDM probe on virtual machine

    Posted Jun 04, 2008 01:10 PM
    We have the vmware probe that monitors our Virtual Infrastructure.  I have the vmware probe monitoring CPU, Memory, and other components of a virtual machine and generating alarms and QoS.  My question is how are people configuring the CDM probe on a virtual machine.  I install the CDM probe on all of my virtual machines and basically use it to monitor disk space only.  I don't use it for monitoring any CPU, Memory, Paging, Swap, Processor Queue Lenght, etc. 

    Does anybody else have an insight onto how they use CDM on a virtual machine?


  • 2.  CDM probe on virtual machine
    Best Answer

    Posted Jun 05, 2008 04:22 AM
    It sounds like we have kind of gone the opposite route from you.  For most virtual machines, we want to get complete monitoring information from them as if they were physical servers.  This is especially true of Windows virtual machines, on which the ntevl probe plays an important role.  We install NimBUS the same across all Windows servers that we manage or monitor, regardless of whether or not they are a VM.

    We always figured we could use the vmware probe to monitor VMs on which we do not install the NimBUS robot software (if we are not officially managing or monitoring the VM), but we have not found much need to do that yet.

    Regards,
    Keith Kruepke


  • 3.  CDM probe on virtual machine

    Posted Jun 05, 2008 12:30 PM
    The thing with a virtual machines though is that the CPU and Memory statistics gathered through perfmon, which the CDM probe uses, are not 100% accurate.  I've alwasy been guided towards using ESXTop and VirtualCenter for monitoring virtual machine performance and the vmware probe kind of fits into that toolset by using VMwares monitoring information.  I have noticed in some instances that the CDM probe varies from what acutally is going on in the virtual machine.


  • 4.  CDM probe on virtual machine

    Posted Jun 06, 2008 10:39 AM
    We also go the opposite route and monitor the virtual machines the same way as physical boxes. We havent seen any difference between the number in Virtual Center and the numbers coming out of the CDM probe. We are using the VM probe just for monitoring the ESX hosts themselves as well as the SAN LUNs attached to them.


  • 5.  CDM probe on virtual machine

    Posted Jul 11, 2008 06:55 AM
    Interesting because I've used both the CDM and vmware probe and I got into the SLM and compare performance reports and for some virtual machines they were considerabley different.  Not all machines.  Most were very similar and almost the same, but there were a handful of machines where there was a significant difference.


  • 6.  CDM probe on virtual machine

    Posted Jun 25, 2009 10:48 PM
    Hi,

    How can you check the total amount of memory used by all the VM servers on a specific server. On the physical server I have currently a CDM probe but it measures only the amount of memory used by the server and not the total amount used by the virtual servers on that machine. Is that possible to do it with the CDM probe?

    Many thanks for your answers.

    Wouter


  • 7.  CDM probe on virtual machine

    Posted Jun 26, 2009 01:03 AM
    Wouter,

    Have you checked the vmware probe?  If that gives you the information you need, I think that would be the best way to get it.  It requires VirtualCenter, so it will not be an option if you do not have that installed.

    We also noticed that the cdm probe installed directly on a VMware host only reports data for the management virtual machine and not the overall ESX environment.  Before the vmware probe came along, I had to create a custom probe to parse the output of the esxtop command.

    Regards,
    Keith