Monitoring in a Virtualized Environment

Monitoring solutions for virtualizedinfrastructure (VI) should evolve to collect, analyze andprovide configuration recommendation based on a broaderrange of operational metrics. A virtualized infrastructureis a complex interaction of hardware (servers, network andstorage), hosting variety of multi-tier application with specificservice level requirements and governed by their security andcompliance policies. Most existing solutions of today monitorand analyze only a subset of these interactions. The analysis andrecommendation obtained tend to optimize only particular aspectsof the infrastructure and can potentially introduce violations forthe others. A virtualized infrastructure is dynamic in nature,providing immense opportunities to automate configurationchanges to virtual machines, networks and storage. It deliversthe capability to administer the whole of infrastructure as a largeresource pool shared by multiple workloads. Monitoring solutionsthat look at only few aspects end up forcing administrators tocreate silos within the infrastructure that are specially designedto ensure that business service requirements are met for thespecific applications running there. A monitoring solution thatcan collect and analyze multiple aspects for assisting in decisionmaking and process automation can deliver greater efficiency tothe virtualized infrastructure.In this paper we argue the importance of having amonitoring solution that provides a holistic view of thevirtualized infrastructure. We discuss the need for solutions tobe capable of monitoring and analyzing a broader set of metricssuch as health of infrastructure components; performance ofoperating environment such as hypervisors, operating systemsand application running on them; capacity utilization indicatorsfor server, networks and storages; information available withconfiguration and change management database containingpolicies including security and compliance policies. We also takea look at what these broader set of metrics are and who wouldbe interested in them. The paper further proposes a monitoringframework for collecting and analyzing the above mentionedaspects of a virtual infrastructure to develop a more completesolution