SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.
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Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SignalFX is Real-Time Cloud Monitoring and Observability for Infrastructure, Microservices and Applications. SignalFX was acquired by Splunk in August 2019. SignalFX Infrastructure Monitoring provides real-time cloud monitoring and observability platform for infrastructure, microservices and DevOps. A new SignalFX product, SignalFx Microservices APM, was released March 2020 to detect issues, provide real-time app troubleshooting, and future-proof expectations.
[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is well suited for any complicated environment where you have apps and servers across multiple clouds and platforms and products. If you have a data centre where all your apps and servers are in one single network, you could probably get away with older solutions. But for any modern, complex, hybrid-cloud microservices environment, Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is a must-have.
I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.
SignalFX handles historical metric aggregation exceptionally well, providing a multifaceted approach to event detection based on anomalies.
SignalFX's cost is incredibly flexible with their pricing model of DPM (data-point per minute) vs the traditional "per host" model that most monitoring SaaS use.
SignalFX support is responsive and knowledgeable, very eager to help solve your immediate problems.
SignalFX integrations is vast and constantly growing, making adoption easy even when multiple different open-source technologies are used in your stack.
We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.
Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.
Good: Stable system with low error rate Easy to use for simple use cases Bad: UI is not very clear for complex usage Mobile view (when logged in from phone) is bad No library for .net
SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
I find that learning the interface can take some time. We need a better show-and-tell on how the Teams pages, Dashboard Groups, Dashboards and charts delay. Advance SignalFlow is sometimes hard to build. Some better samples of advanced SignalFlow would be helpful. For example, Splunk SPL has a vast resource of examples.
SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis
The operation began using Nagios XI, after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.
They’re not for the same purpose but we’re using NewRelic and Honeycomb for monitoring purposes. NewRelic is used for HTTP client monitoring for system related throughput, error, database and external client monitoring. Honeycomb is used to monitor actual HTTP request/response values. Splunk [Infrastructure Monitoring] is used for real-time application related throughout and error monitoring.
VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.
Caused us to get a lot of spam when we redeployed apps and old instances stopped sending metrics. Muting alerts solves this, but people often forget to do it or do it incorrectly.
Helped us find historical info about instances/apps.
