Enterprise virtualization adoption has accelerated in recent years, with 84% of enterprise servers now virtualized according to Spiceworks. As virtual environments scale up in size and complexity, the right monitoring tools become essential for administering performance, availability and security of critical virtual workloads.
This article reviews the top virtualization monitoring platforms that meet the demanding needs of medium to large corporate IT teams managing sizable VMware, Hyper-V and Kubernetes deployments across hybrid infrastructure.
Surging Growth Driving Virtualization Monitoring Demands
Worldwide spending on infrastructure to enable virtualization is forecast to grow at a 12.7% CAGR from $152 billion in 2022 to $266 billion in 2026 according to IDC. What‘s driving this surge?
Cost and Flexibility: Virtualization enables companies to consolidate servers and run more workloads for less. VMs can be spun up quickly to support changing needs.
Disaster Recovery: Mission critical systems can be replicated via virtualization. If the primary site goes down, traffic is routed to a secondary site.
Support for Cloud: Virtualized environments make it easier to migrate and interconnect with public cloud platforms like AWS.
Desktop Virtualization: 43% of companies have some remote employees utilizing virtual desktops according to Spiceworks, which rose during the pandemic.
However, larger VM deployments also create management headaches IT teams. Over half of organizations using virtualization report facing problems related to sprawl and VM proliferation according to SolarWinds research.
Common virtualization issues include:
- Performance bottlenecks creating app slowdowns
- Unprotected VMs not covered by backup
- VM sprawl wasting resources and costing more
- Security gaps and outdated VMs at risk
These issues amplify costs, risk and complexity. Advanced monitoring tools have therefore become a necessity to run efficient, resilient and secure virtual environments as they scale.
Key Capabilities of Virtualization Monitoring Software
Effective virtualization monitoring and management solutions share some core capabilities that companies should look for when evaluating options:
Unified Dashboards – Single pane of glass to view performance across private/public cloud hosts, VMs, containers, storage.
Auto-Discovery – Automatically maps dependencies and topology between virtual platform layers.
Alerting – Ability to set custom thresholds and triggers to notify teams of issues.
ROI Reporting – Ties spending to infrastructure utilization for showback/chargeback.
Forecasting – Planning tools leveraging historical usage data to right size future capacity.
VM Optimization – Balances VM workload placement and resource allocations to hosts.
Closed-loop Integration – Ability to trigger actions or IT process workflows based on monitored events.
Next we will profile 8 leading enterprise virtualization monitoring and management platforms that offer combinations of these key capabilities.
1. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is designed to provide unified performance monitoring, analytics and optimization for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.
Key capabilities include:
- Unified management for VMware and Hyper-V
- Monitoring of private/public cloud VMs
- Dashboards visualize virtual topology
- Identify orphaned or abandoned VMs
- Forecast models for capacity planning
- VM right-sizing and placement advice
- PerfStackTM dashboard identifies issues
- Custom reports and alerting
SolarWinds VMAN presents one of the strongest options for cross-platform multi-hypervisor monitoring with advanced tuning capabilities paired with ease of deployment and use. It starts at $2,995 for up to 100 VMs.
2. Veeam ONE
Veeam ONE complements Veeam‘s strong backup tools by providing extensive monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for VMware vSphere and Hyper-V virtualized environments.
Key features:
- Heatmaps show backup resource usage
- VM performance monitoring and alerts
- Planning tools for resource allocation
- Model VM-to-host mappings
- Restore point verification
- vSphere change tracking audits
- Reporting on data protection status
With robust virtual infrastructure visibility and planning tools, Veeam ONE nicely complements Veeam Backup & Replication while also supporting third party data protection tools. Starts at $780 per year for monitoring 10 VMs.
3. Quest Foglight
Foglight by Quest Software takes an advanced cross-stack approach to application performance monitoring and virtual infrastructure management.
Key capabilities:
- Unified visibility spanning apps to VMs
- Advanced transaction tracing
- Replay of performance incidents
- ML-driven analytics and alerting
- Automated discovery and mapping
- Flexible deployment options
Foglight shines with holistic monitoring and robust APM capabilities delivering a distributed, heterogeneous approach ideal for complex enterprise environments. Contact Quest for pricing.
4. Zabbix
Zabbix offers an open-source platform for virtualization monitoring and management designed to operate at massive scale.
Why customers use Zabbix:
- Monitor millions of metrics across VMs
- No vendor lock-in
- Hypervisor host resource monitoring
- Customizable dashboards and visuals
- Scale-out monitoring architecture
- Template-based monitoring workflows
- REST APIs and third-party integrations
For DevOps teams used to leveraging OSS tools, Zabbix provides advanced VM management without the overhead of commercial software licensing. Being open source, Zabbix pricing is based on costs of infrastructure resources, support etc.
5. eG Enterprise
eG Enterprise takes an automated approach to performance monitoring and management for large, complex virtual environments spanning VMware, Hyper-V, containers and cloud.
Key aspects:
- Automated discovery and mapping
- Advanced analytics engine finds issues
- Cross-correlation of metrics across tiers
- Planning via "what if" modeling
- Reporting on SLA compliance
- Agentless or lightweight agent
Designed for enterprise scale, eG Enterprise emphasizes automation to simplify operations teams monitoring very large and dynamic global infrastructure. Contact eG for pricing details.
6. Turbonomic (IBM)
Turbonomic assimilates real-time data to automate placement and sizing of VMs dynamically based on actual consumption and allocation of resources using AI.
Why it helps:
- Reduces overprovisioning waste
- Closed-loop remediation
- Matches supply to demand in real-time
- Scales actions as environments grow
- Runs apps at assured performance
- Manages on-prem and multi-cloud
For large companies running business critical applications, Turbonomic‘s autonomous optimization keeps virtual workloads running smoothly at the lowest cost. Get pricing quote from IBM.
7. Paessler PRTG
PRTG by Paessler offers unified infrastructure monitoring capabilities across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
Key features:
- Monitor VMs via major hypervisors
- Dashboards, maps and graphs
- Alerting based on thresholds
- Customizable sensors
- Easy auto-discovery setup
- Cluster-enabled installation
With broad capabilities tailored for virtual environments paired with an elegant interface, PRTG provides a strong option for mid-market IT teams. Starts at $1,600 for up to 500 sensors.
8. DotYourOwn (DYO)
DotYourOwn is purpose built for large-scale VMware virtualization and vSphere environments using lightweight agent sensors for data collection.
Why VMware enterprise clients use DYO:
- Real-time VM performance insights
- Rapid deployment of sensors
- Instant visibility for VM admins
- Unified view across host servers
- Customizable topology mapping
- Role-based access control
- API integration capabilities
DYO provides an elegant monitoring solution fine tuned for even the largest, most resource intensive VMware installations. Contact DotYourOwn for pricing details.
Key Criteria for Evaluation
There are clearly many capable virtualization monitoring tools to evaluate. Every organization will weigh factors differently depending on their environment and objectives. We recommend considering requirements across these key dimensions:
Scale – Number of hosts, clusters, VMs that need monitoring including future growth.
Platforms – Multi-hypervisor support, private/public cloud, orchestration.
Integration – With broader monitoring stack, ITSM tools like ServiceNow.
Analytics – Trend analysis, capacity forecasting and planning abilities.
Ease of Use – Deployment effort, customization vs out-of-box features.
Pricing – Per VM/host, perpetual license or SaaS options.
Building a clear picture of must-have capabilities will aid selection process.
Bottom Line
Virtualization underpins a massive chunk of enterprise infrastructure in 2023. But unmatched flexibility comes with distinct performance and scaling challenges.
Robust monitoring and management tools have become as vital as the virtual platforms themselves for driving efficiency, while preventing outages that erode competitiveness.
Hopefully this overview provides a useful starting point for IT teams re-evaluating needs as their VM environments grow ever larger and more strategic. Reach out if we can help assess tool requirements or vendor options suited for your specific environment.
