#vDM30in30,  #vExpert,  Uncategorised

Free monitoring tools to help you sleep at night

I just thought I would do a quick post on a few of the monitoring tools I am finding in my kit bag more day to day. This of course is not exhaustive but just a few that I have fell in love with that always seem to help me out

1.  PRTG Monitor

I love PRTG monitor for small environments or just monitoring your Tier 1 Apps as it helps provide another perspective even from paid tools. I find the ping & service monitor useful with a simple dashboard I can run on another screen. I also quite like the sflow monitor for select switches so I can get some basic traffic flows between servers even down to the port level. Lastly it has always helped me out when certain other monitoring solutions cant report on something due to its in built PowerShell monitoring. From this I have always been able to devise some form of script to monitor what I have needed to. Oh its also always great for monitoring your lab. I hope to add some of these scripts I mentioned shortly.

 

2. vCheck and Scripts

If I am ever in any doubt I will always pop past Alan Renouf’s page and grab his scripts. In many places his vCheck script has managed to minimise many daily checks. I am also hoping to add to this after the VMworld hackathon.

 

3. Turbonomic

If I am ever in any doubt about my balancing of work loads (even DRS) from now on I would highly suggest this product. Even the free version here does help you out and can help you digest logs better sometimes than vCenter with the reports it can produce. It even helps out with cloud services and manage those unruly bills when things have been over provisioned.

4. Flings

Not always monitoring but always worth keeping an eye on the flings for interesting things. The new vCenter 6.5 interface was born from here. For some people the DRS Doctor and Logon Monitor may help.

 

 

 

 

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