Virtual Machine Monitoring: Keeping Your Digital Engines Purring

Virtual machines (VMs) are the workhorses of the IT world, letting you run multiple operating systems on a single machine. They're cost-effective, flexible, and a great way to keep your business running smoothly. But just like any engine, VMs need monitoring to ensure peak performance.

Many organizations use virtual machines within their IT infrastructure, and understandably, they run multiple OS environments on a single machine, saving management costs, time, and physical space. Virtual machines include integrated application provisioning and disaster recovery options, making them great for business operations. However, monitoring them is essential to ensure consistent performance, get a holistic view of what’s going on within your virtual environment, and troubleshoot problems.

MetricFire’s Hosted Graphite service has made monitoring a virtual machine relatively easy. It requires minimal configuration, and you can set it up in minutes. To learn more about monitoring your VM with MetricFire, you can book a demo today and sign up for a 14-day free trial.     

What is a virtual machine?

A virtual machine is a computing resource that runs applications and programs using software instead of hardware. It lives on a physical machine, which is referred to as a host. Each virtual machine has its operating system, which is different from the host’s operating system and runs separately from other virtual machines.  

Apart from a separate OS and hardware configuration, each VM has internet connectivity options, disks for storing files, CPU, and memory. This is known as virtualization and helps ensure system resources are used efficiently using software known as hypervisor.     

Here's why monitoring your VMs is crucial:

• Catch problems before they cause chaos: High CPU usage? Dwindling memory? VM monitoring will alert you before these issues crash your virtual world.
• Fine-tune for peak performance: Imagine a world where your applications run smoothly and users are happy. By identifying bottlenecks, you can optimize your VMs and keep everyone productive.
• Plan for the future: Is your VM environment ready for growth? Monitoring helps you predict future needs and upgrade when necessary.
• Security shield: VMs can be entry points for attackers. Monitoring helps you identify suspicious activity and keep your data safe.

Step-by-step guide to monitoring your VM

By monitoring your virtual machine, you can ensure its peak performance and uptime. You can also monitor resource utilization, such as CPU usage, health, availability, and memory utilization so that you can address issues before they disrupt your normal business operations or affect end users. Monitoring also allows you to plan capacity and make more informed decisions when allocating virtual machines to servers. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you monitor your virtual machine.

1. Prerequisites 

To be able to monitor your VM, you need to have the following:

• A virtual machine set up in your environment 

• A monitoring tool that can collect, display, and analyse the relevant alerts and metrics from virtual machines. This is where MetricFire comes in. Make sure you’re signed up to be able to monitor the VM. 

• The proper access and permissions needed to install and configure monitoring agents on your virtual machine 

2. Configuration

To configure and monitor a virtual machine, choose a reliable monitoring tool. MetricFire provides a robust platform for collecting, visualizing, and storing metrics, making it great for monitoring VMs. Then, it would be best if you did the following:

• Install monitoring agents on your VM to monitor critical metrics, including resource usage and system performance.

• Set up alerts so that you get timely notifications for performance issues or anomalies. This involves setting up baselines and thresholds for each monitor to help you troubleshoot issues. You can set the alerts triggered by various events, like detecting a failure, exceeding a threshold, or deviating from a baseline. By proactively monitoring your VM, you can quickly respond to problems.

• Customize and configure the metrics you want to monitor. Tailor your monitoring strategy to your specific needs, whether tracking application performance, memory usage, network traffic, CPU usage, or parameters like response time, availability, and uptime. 

• Integrate a dashboard using MetricFire’s hosted Grafana services. With Grafana, you can create visually stunning dashboards for historical and real-time data visualization. 

• Build Grafana dashboards that allow you to see the health and performance of your VM with just a glance. It’s quite easy to create custom dashboards that fulfil your specific requirements using MetricFire’s Hosted Grafana services. These dashboards can provide a comprehensive overview and detailed information on your VMs that can help you visualize various metrics and identify availability or performance issues.   

• Config the granularity and frequency of data reporting and collection, as this affects the efficiency and accuracy of your monitoring. 

3. Sending metrics to MetricFire

MetricFire is a full-scale monitoring platform that uses multiple open-source tools to provide application, system, server, network, and infrastructure monitoring. With hosted Graphite and custom dashboards, you can visualize metrics to better understand what’s going on within your VM. 

By sending different metrics from your VMs to MetricFire, you can evaluate the utilization and efficiency of both your host systems and VM resources, optimize their allocation and configuration, detect and eliminate bottlenecks, failures, and errors, and improve their reliability and security. This way, you can get insights into your VM’s performance and behavior and understand the impact of any changes you might have made. 

To monitor virtual machines and send metrics to MetricFire, sign up for a 14-day free trial or book a demo today. You can also talk to the MetricFire team to learn more about how you can integrate and monitor your virtual machines using their hosted Graphite and Grafana services.   

You can then use these metrics to implement preventive and corrective actions for your VMs and plan upgrades to improve your VM environment. 

4. Top Grafana dashboards for monitoring virtual machines

Grafana has a user-friendly interface and an extensive library of plugins, making it a great choice for creating dashboards to monitor virtual machines. From basic system metrics like network traffic, disk usage, memory, and CPU and application performance to resource allocation, security, and compliance, you can find Grafana dashboards for nearly everything. If not, you can tailor the dashboards to your organization’s key performance indicators and special needs.  

To help you get started, here are some of the best Grafana dashboards you should check out:

USE dashboard

The USE dashboard tracks three important metrics: utilization, saturation, and errors. It’s geared more toward your infrastructure’s hardware resources and helps you understand your machine’s performance and the underlying cause of problems within your infrastructure.

REDS dashboard

The REDS dashboard tracks requests, errors, duration, and saturation. It is more service-oriented and provides insights into how your services are performing. It’s a great way to get an idea of your users’ experience and is the one you most likely want to use for alerts. 

Drill-down and overview dashboards

You can make drill-down dashboards in Grafana by linking different Grafana dashboards to drill down from an aggregated view to a detailed view. Meanwhile, you can get aggregated metrics for a service or infrastructure using the overview dashboard. You can then have a second-level dashboard to see more detailed metrics for a single component instance or a subset of an infrastructure. 

Metrics exploration dashboards

This dashboard is an excellent option when you don’t know the metrics available for a particular system. It uses repeated panels and templates for generic queries to discover and browse through the different metrics in a data source. With this dashboard, you get answers to questions like how you can benefit from a data source and what you can do once you’re connected to your data source. 

Benefits of using MetricFire

MetricFire can help you monitor the health and performance of your virtual machine. By providing real-time visibility into your virtual machine, it allows you to monitor your CPU, memory, network, and disk usage to ensure optimal resource allocation. It also allows you to set up alerts so that you can be immediately notified in case there’s a problem and take action. You can also analyse historical data to understand trends and scale and allocate resources better.

Plus, it takes away the hassle of installing, configuring, implementing, and maintaining Graphite and Grafana by providing hosted versions of both tools. As a result, you can easily track different metrics, including memory usage and CPU. And since you don’t need to take care of the installation, configuration, or maintenance, you can focus on the system’s performance. 

MetricFire: Your VM Monitoring Copilot

MetricFire takes the hassle out of VM monitoring. Here's how it makes you a VM management master:

• See everything, understand everything: MetricFire stores all your VM data in one place, making it easy to see how everything works together.
• No more spreadsheet nightmares: Forget clunky spreadsheets! MetricFire lets you create clear, colorful dashboards showing what's happening with your VMs.
• Predict problems before they happen: MetricFire's built-in anomaly detection is like a sixth sense for VM troubles. It will warn you of any suspicious activity before it can cause problems.
• Plan for the future like a boss: MetricFire's forecasting helps you predict future VM needs. This lets you be proactive and avoid any nasty surprises down the road.
• Scale with ease: MetricFire grows with your VM environment, so you'll always have the necessary visibility.
• Get alerted instantly: Set up custom alerts to be notified when something goes wrong with your VMs. This means you can act quickly and keep your virtual world running smoothly.
• Plays well with others: MetricFire works seamlessly with all your favorite IT management tools.
• Do more for less: MetricFire is an affordable way to get robust VM monitoring. It allows you to save money while keeping your VMs healthy and happy.

Conclusion

Stop flying blind with your VMs. Sign up for MetricFire today and take control of your virtual environment with robust monitoring. Monitoring virtual machines is essential for maintaining your IT infrastructure's performance, reliability, and security. Without monitoring them, you won’t be able to ensure they remain healthy and, ultimately, harness their full potential. By following this step-by-step guide and leveraging the power of MetricFire, which provides Hosted Graphite services, you can ensure that your virtual machines operate at best and proactively address any issues that may arise.  To learn more about the VM monitoring services provided by MetricFire, you can book a demo today or sign up for a 14-day free trial.