Network General tool peers inside virtual machines

The Holy Grail of "holistic" application platform monitoring has been picked up by Network General. To its NetVigil monitoring product, the company had added modules that let IT personnel peer into the workings of two popular virtualization products: VMware's ESX and Microsoft Virtual Server.

As virtual machines propagate throughout the enterprise at astonishing rates -- industry analysts have predicted that this market will ring in close to $30 billion next year -- IT is scrambling to manage virtualized resources alongside traditional physical resources. Until now, the ability to keep a close on on the hypervisor layer in virtual-server environments has been elusive. By tapping into the virtual-service messaging processes, NetVigil now aggregates information about hosted operating systems and applications running on them with physical and network data points.

NetVigil is targeted at IT administrators who require a comprehensive view of application behavior, ranging from responsiveness to underlying virtual-machine platformance to network conditions typically reported on by the wider NetVigil network-monitoring functions (see a test of those capabilities).

The NetVigil modules also can be anchored to the virtual machines' popular rapid-rehosting and resource-tuning capabilities, to provide IT personnel with information about when they should be reallocating business-application resources to gain optimal performance.

In this testing of virtual-machine-monitoring capabilities (see How we did it), we found it takes a lot of preparation and configuration work to yield useful data. But once that work was done, we became addicted to its easily discernible monitoring interface, which provides a view-of-views for all major applications running on our systems.

NetVigil's business end is a management console that provides administrator-crafted views of application process and platform groups as modular containers of information. The containers are meant to represent discrete application functions, such as Web servers or e-mail servers.

Making NetVigil useful takes administrative work and explicit knowledge of network, server, virtual server, operating-system and application parameters in order for it to pay off in terms of tying the information together into logical and sensibly grouped containers. Fortunately, highly articulate views of business objects can be made, then poised toward alarm generation and easily understandable reports about business-object conditions.

Although NetVigil depends on input data it has no control over -- it taps into Microsoft's Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for Microsoft Virtual Server information and SNMP-supplied VMware data -- it lets system administrators get useful, broad-brush views of virtual systems' health. It can perform better than the most basic tests to assess system health, such as simple ping tests (are you alive?) and HTTP page loads (is the server up and coughing out pages in a timely way?) in an ad hoc or regularly scheduled fashion. in addition, an administrator can set virtual-machine system performance thresholds that trigger an alarm if exceeded.