With the vast amount of interest new and unrivalled features such as vGPU are attracting. I’m increasingly meeting new customers to Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop interested in monitoring functionality not only for these two products but other Citrix products such as Netscaler but their existing hypervisors and physical servers.
Many of our customers say it is important to them that they protect themselves by retaining the option to modify their infrastructure and move workloads around on a hybrid-infrastructure consisting of physical hardware, multiple hypervisors, desktop deployments and even public clouds.
As such I’ve tried to list a few of the products available that can help users avoid hypervisor or vendor lock in and can be used to monitor and/or manage XenServer. Covering a range of usages e.g. ISP tailored solutions, XenDesktop applications but also a range of budgets including free solutions (alphabetic).
- CA Nimsoft: A winner at Citrix Synergy 2013 for their CloudPlatform integration that complements Nimsoft’s cross-hypervisor, cross-infrastructure monitoring capabilities including XenServer monitoring. Popular with telcos. and ISPs.
- ComTrade Microsoft SCOM integration for XenServer.
- eGInnovations: a long-standing Citrix partner offering a multi-hypervisor, XenDesktop, networking and workload analysis. More details.
- Goliath Monitoring: another long-standing Citrix partner offering monitoring and reporting functionality including workload analysis for XenApp, XenDesktop, Netscaler and other infrastructure including vSphere. Pretty XenCenter plugin available.
- HotLink SuperVisor: vCenter plugin allowing XenServer and other hypervisors to be managed from vCenter and integrated with existing vSphere installations
- HypOps: HypOps is a mobile application that provides management of virtualization platforms. Currently this app is supported on iPad and iPhone and provides management and basic control of cloud and hypervisor infrastructure. Supports Citrix XenServer and the Amazon EC2 Cloud and CloudStack platform.
- LogicMonitor the XenServer monitoring component complements others provding Cloud, multi-hypervisor, networking and application monitoring from a single dashboard.
- Op5 Monitor: Visually stunning commercially support Nagios based solution. Popular with large telcos. and ISPs.
- Nagios Monitoring for XenServer. Although insertion of Nagios into XenServer’s dom0 is unsupported, integration via the XenServer APIs and RRDs plugins is supported.
- Verax Systems XenServer plugin for the popular Verax NMS & APM products which provides a service-oriented, unified management & monitoring of networks, applications and infrastructure enabling quick problem detection, root-cause analysis, reporting and automating recovery.
- VMTurbo free community cross-hypervisor performance monitoring complementing premium functionality performing automated workload analysis and balancing and pre-emptive diagnosis and resolution of issues
- ZenOss ZenPack for XenServer: Recently released, enhanced real-time performance and availability monitoring and event management for XenServer and CloudStack/CloudPlatform augmenting ZenOss’s other monitoring packs.
Bonus Free product! Built-in monitoring with XenCenter: A wide range of metrics are available for XenServer with the XenCenter free management GUI including: C-State, P-State, IOPS, Latency and many more. Not all of these are turned on by default. The full range of metrics available for both Hosts and VMs are detailed in Chapter 9 of the XenServer 6.2 Administrators Guide. This chapter also details how you can explore these metrics via XenCenter and the configuration of automated threshold alerts.
It’s very easy to integrate products within XenCenter via the plug-in interface and allows users the flexibility to build and integrate existing tools and monitoring scripts into XenCenter as a single-pane of glass.
