Best tools for monitoring your VMWare environment?

We currently have Splunk and ManageEngine App Manager, though neither are configured for monitoring our new virtual environment. Also the both solutions are about to expire or run out of available space(Splunk 500 mb limit) so we might need to be looking at new tools.

I’m sure this could real hairy, when people talk about the “best.” I’m really just looking for some sort of consensus on what people are using to manage the health and performance of the ESX/I hosts. Things that I could research. We currently have 4 hosts in a 14 blade cap bladecenter with about 20 virtuals. I expect that to at least double by Summer 2013.

These are the programs I’ve found, anyone have any thoughts on them?

ManageEngine
Veeam One
Splunk App for VMWare
Nagios
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager
VKernel vOPS
Zenoss

Any others to add?

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Comments

scott28tt

What about VMware's own vCenter Operations Manager?

dave330i

In such a small environment, you can use the tools built into vCenter.

jibbajabba

dave330i wrote: »

In such a small environment, you can use the tools built into vCenter.

I agree ... Veeam one is what i used for small environments, for big ones I used vFoglight ...

QHalo

We're using Solarwinds, because we're using it on the networking side as well. Nice to have one console for it all.

sratakhin

As Dave mentioned, vCenter is good enough. We also have 4 hosts.

tycoonbob

OpenNMS is a free open source solution that I love. I use it to monitor my entire network (MySQL, MS SQL, FTP, HTTP, SSH, SNMP, etc). I know there are agents for certain hardware vendors so you could monitor the hardware and there is also ESXi monitoring script that can be run. More at this link for those:
VMwareMonitoring - OpenNMS | The OpenNMS Project

OpenNMS is an enterprise class Open Source monitoring solution with paid support, or free community support. For a small environment, I think it's a great platform. It's great for large environments as well, as long as you know how to use the software.