Documentation forVirtualization Manager
Monitoring virtual environments is a key capability of Hybrid Cloud Observability Advanced and is also available in a standalone module, Virtualization Manager (VMAN). Hybrid Cloud Observability Advanced and VMAN are built on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform.

Optimizing virtual resources with VMAN

Your virtual machine environment can quickly grow in size and number of resources, becoming unmanageable or difficult to monitor over time. To help manage your environment, Virtualization Manager provides tools to easily evaluate current usage, locate possible allocation issues, and manage resources.

VMAN provides additional historical data and metric reporting through dashboards to locate and manage stale, zombie, and rogue VMs. With this continuously polled and collected data, you can better understand and troubleshoot:

  • Active usage of your VMs
  • Allocated resources to over and under utilized systems, requiring balancing
  • Stale, zombie, and rogue VMs costing your company in unused or overused resource

 

The VM Sprawl dashboard - Virtualization Manager provides a consolidated view through the Sprawl dashboard to help monitor and manage VMs through resources using specific queries and events. The Sprawl dashboard tracks the vital issues that occur in a sprawling environment: resource allocations, snapshots, alerts, and VM resource status. Using the dashboard, you can reclaim wasted VM resources including idle and stale VMs, optimize performance by right-sizing under- and over- allocated VMs, remove orphaned VMDK files, and manage snapshots.

Recommendations - After you have deployed and configured VMAN, the first things you may want to monitor are active or potential bottlenecks, allocation needs, or performance issues. Depending on the size of your virtual environment, the amount of data to review can be staggering. To help pinpoint problems and optimization opportunities, VMAN lists Recommendations for VM balancing, troubleshooting, and issue resolution.

Capacity Planning - Use Capacity Planning to create scenarios using historical and trending data to determine resource usage in virtual environments. Based on reports generated from the scenarios, you can better determine and plan your virtual resource allocation, clusters, hosts, and more.

AppStack - The AppStack displays a visual representation of the entire environment to quickly scan for warning and critical status issues. As you hover over each item, you can review additional status data for at-a-glance insight into issues. Click a monitored node to drill down into additional details pages to further investigate and resolve problems.

Performance Analysis - The Performance Analysis dashboard (PerfStack™) allows you to create troubleshooting projects that visually correlate historical time series data from multiple SolarWinds products and entity types in a single view.