vSphere encompasses the entirety of VMware’s virtualization platform. Formerly known as VMware Infrastructure, vSphere consists of several products and technologies that provide the infrastructure to virtualize your environment. These technologies include:
- ESXi – a Type-1 hypervisor. ESXi runs on hosts to manage the execution of the virtual machines (VMs) and allocates resources to them as needed.
- vCenter Server – an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments. vCenter Server allows you to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure.
- vCenter Client – a management interface that enables users to remotely connect to vCenter Server.
- Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) – a cluster file system for ESXi virtual machines.
According to VMware, vSphere enables you to “unleash a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that accelerates your digital transformation to hybrid cloud…helping you run, manage, connect, and secure your applications in a common operating environment across clouds.”
Monitoring vSphere Application Performance with Instana
Effectively monitoring your vSphere based applications requires visibility at every layer of your application stack. Instana automates the process of monitoring your vSphere environment including automatic discovery of all application components, vSphere components and technologies, VMs, and services. Once installed, Instana will automatically deploy sensors for each application component while mapping every dependency. Instana monitors your full stack application performance with virtually no effort on your part. With Instana Application Performance Monitoring for vSphere you get:
Automatic and continuous discovery – Instana uses a single, lightweight agent per host to continually discover all components (ESXi, VMs, vCenter Servers, etc.), and deploy the appropriate sensors for each technology. These sensors then pull all of the configuration data and performance metrics that are needed to determine the health of your environment.
Automatic visualization and dependency mapping – Instana automatically maps and visualizes your entire vSphere environment providing an exact understanding of the relationship and dependencies of every component. Every component is mapped and its corresponding metric data, configuration, dependencies, and component health are captured.
Immediate performance feedback – Instana immediately provides visibility and performance feedback as new code moves through your build and release pipelines. Instana automatically traces every application request flowing through your vSphere environment and pulls together each distributed trace for a full, end-to-end view. By doing so, Instana ensures you will always have the complete data set to see the exact impact of every deployment and every change.
Exact root cause determination – Instana automatically delivers a full analysis of every user impact. Instana’s automated anomaly detection correlates metrics, traces, exceptions, logged errors, and configuration data based on application and service dependencies, providing exact root cause analysis in seconds.
With Instana’s automated monitoring for vSphere based applications, you will always know what is happening within your vSphere environment. With continuous discovery, dependency mapping, metric monitoring, distributed tracing, anomaly detection, and analytics across the complete data set, you’ll be able to optimize your vSphere applications and immediately get to the root of any customer impacting issue. With Instana’s immediate, exact understanding of quality, you will be able to confidently deliver better quality software, faster.
To see how Instana can help you better monitor and manage your vSphere environment, simply sign up for a free trial of Instana today.
