Orion NPM versus Virtual & Server Profiler

Hey Byron-

I'm not sure if such a document exists--let me do some research and I'll find out.

M

Thanks Marie

This isn't something I need right away.  We are just in the process of moving to a more virtual infrastructure and I was having difficulties understanding how the two products compare.

Hi Byron--

I'm going to ping the Profiler PM on this and have him chime in.

Stay tuned.

M

Byron,

The VMware monitoring in NPM mainly focuses on the ESX server and VM, but not so much on the infrastructure itself.  So both Orion NPM and Profiler will give you asset and performance data on those, but Profiler will also show you Clusters, Data Centers, and Virtual Center views and the relationship between all of them.

Data collected includes storage capacity and usage (datastore and virtual disk), storage forecasting, snapshots, VMDK, performance (CPU, Memory, Network and Disk IO) at all levels of the virtual infrastructure, and a ton of asset and configuration data.  Note all Profiler's data, even the VM, comes from VMware, so it will be different than the data coming from the OS (either via WMI or SNMP).

Profiler takes all that data and does some interesting things with it.

1) Capacity Analysis and Planning - Profiler allows you to take a slice of the physical infrastructure (VC, DC, Cluster, ESX) and see how well you are leveraging it, and how many more VMs you could add to it, and which resource (CPU, Mem, storage) you will run out of first.  We also have simulators that can do some light weight "what if" scenarios.

2) End to End mapping - if you are presenting storage from an array via FC, iSCSI or NFS, Profiler can map the storage E2E for you.  The Datapaths shows are Datastore > LUN and Virtual Disk > VM > VMDK > Datastore > LUN.  It makes it really easy to "know" where your storage is, no matter how it is provided to the virtual infrastructure.

3) VM Grouping - you can group the VMs separately from where they hosted, so you can do chargeback and reporting on specific

And of course, Profiler has alerts as well, not as sophisticated as Orion in some cases, but definitely very useful and better than vCenter. 

See our Virtual and Server Profiler pages for even more info. 

We also have a couple of posts on Virtual and Server Profiler in the Orion blog:

Oh Storage Where Art Thou?

Monitoring Datastores in Profiler

Let me know if you have additional questions or would like a demo.

Brian

Exactly what I was looking for, thanks Brian!