In order to accurately monitor the virtual machines in your environment, it is beneficial to combine two different approaches. Firstly, monitoring guest servers through the physical host, and then monitoring these servers directly using WMI, SNMP or agent.
This combination allows you to identify the cause of performance problems from two different perspectives. Polling through host systems allows you to monitor the basic resources for all virtual servers, as this approach shows information for all virtual machines on that host. However, if you want to monitor your virtual servers in more detail, then you need to populate each server into SolarWinds Orion as an individual device.
So, the process is clear. Firstly, hosts should be added and then you should populate all servers within your virtual environment to your SolarWinds Orion monitoring platform. One of the challenges, once you have performed an initial population, is keeping on top of new servers being added, which if you are working at anything like an average organisation, new VM’s can spring up like rabbits after valentine’s day. We have another blog that deals with device population and automation, but a common problem is identifying all missing virtual servers in your environment, and this is not a one-time-only process as virtual environments are dynamic.
At Prosperon Networks, we have created a report that displays all the virtual servers that are in running state, and have been monitored through physical hosts but are not managed directly by WMI, SNMP, or through the use of agents within SolarWinds Orion. You can schedule this report to get a list of these virtual machines, and you can take out a list of servers to include in the definition for Network Discovery to populate missing servers periodically.
Kind Regards,
Ecmel Ozdemir
Prosperon - UK SolarWinds Partners
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