WHITEPAPER. PHD Virtual Monitor: Unmatched Value. of your finances. Unmatched Value for Your Virtual World

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1 WHITEPAPER PHD Virtual Monitor: Taking control of your finances. Unmatched Value Unmatched Value for Your Virtual World

2 PHD Virtual Monitor: Unmatched Value PHD Virtual Monitor VMTurbo vkernel vops vcenter Operations SCOM Hypervisor Management Client Integration Multi-Hypervisor Support Secure Remote Site Collection Multi-Tenancy & Role-Based Security Physical Server Deep Application Physical Network & Storage Security & Compliance Cost $ $ $$ $$$ $$$$

3 Hypervisor Management Client Integration Most management solutions require users to remotely access the management server to operate its interface. The look and feel, as well as all general management activity, is unique to the application. This can impact the ability to ramp up quickly on a new solution and adds extra steps to the process. PHD Virtual Monitor integrates directly into your existing hypervisor management client. The PHD Virtual Plug-in provides a simple and easy to use interface that results in a single point for monitoring all hypervisors, physical servers, applications, etc., right from within the interface that administrators are used to working with every day. This decreases the time to value because the learning curve of managing PHD Virtual Monitor is nearly zero. Multi-Hypervisor Support Competition in the virtualization industry is heating up, with multiple hypervisor vendors oering solutions tailored to dierent business segments. PHD Virtual Monitor uses the same easy-to-use configuration menus and dashboards to support all of the major hypervisors VMware, Citrix, and Hyper-V. It s one of the only vendors that supports Citrix XenServer using agentless collection methods directly from the hypervisor. This provides robust virtual environment monitoring and automated VM and host discovery ensuring you have insight into how the environment changes without the need to perform extra steps. This is great for cloud deployments that leverage multiple hypervisors to provide IT services in the most ecient means possible. While other vendors do support multiple hypervisors, PHD Virtual is one of the only vendors that supports all three, and requires no additional 3rd party management pack integration to achieve this broad visibility. Secure Remote Site Collection Service providers and large enterprises need the ability to centrally monitor multiple locations in a secure manner. They also need to ensure that data is collected using the most ecient ways possible to avoid negatively impacting production resources and network bandwidth. This is important for scalability, especially when monitoring server and application data from thousands of machines virtual or physical. PHD Virtual Monitor uses both agentless and agentbased collection methods. This allows some data elements to be pulled remotely, while also ensuring deeper, application-level data can be collected locally via the PHD Virtual Intelligent Agent. These agents can also be configured to collect virtual environment and SNMP information at remote locations and transmit that data back securely to the central server. Many competitors today focus on agentless collection methods only, which are good for ease of use. However, when polling for large amounts of data over the WAN they find they are unable to collect and analyze the data eciently. This can result in slower problem detection and even force users to monitor fewer systems and metrics, leaving blind spots in the datacenter. Multi-Tenancy and Role-Based Security Enterprises and service providers require the ability to have multiple users, or groups of users, accessing the same software in a way that limits access only to the devices and functionality they require. Most vendors of monitoring software are capable of providing role-based security. Where PHD Virtual sets itself apart is the ease-of-use and flexibility when configuring multi-tenancy and role-based access. Not only can PHD Virtual control access to specific devices for multi-tenancy, but it can easily control access to monitoring rules and reporting capabilities as well.

4 Physical Server Physical server monitoring encompasses the ability to detect, report against, and even remediate issues with non-virtualized Windows, Linux and Unix servers. This includes not only physical hardware and resource usage monitoring, but also deep application-level monitoring and automated remediation. PHD Virtual Monitor leverages its Intelligent Agent to monitor deep server metrics and hardware components of physical Windows, Linux, and Unix machines. Many virtualization monitoring vendors are not capable of providing this level of detail for non-virtualized servers. The vendors that do oer this level of support are expensive and in many cases the agents used are resource intensive. The PHD Virtual Monitor Intelligent Agent uses less than a tenth of a percent of CPU and just a few megabytes of memory, yet is capable of providing robust monitoring and alerting near to real-time. It is also extremely easy to deploy with preconfigured monitoring rules and a simple interface for customization. Deep Application just the infrastructure isn t good enough there are too many guest and application-level issues that can also impact performance and availability. Understanding CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics are important, but there are also very specific application-level metrics, services, and processes that are just as important for identifying issues and bottlenecks. The PHD Virtual Intelligent Agent monitors applications at a deep level of detail. Separate agents for specific applications are not required, keeping cost and complexity to a minimum. The same Windows and Linux agents can have any number of monitoring rules applied to identify and even remediate issues within a particular application. Most major applications already have pre-configured monitoring rules available for ease of use. They can be modified easily and new custom rules can be applied for applications that are not monitored out of the box. Other vendors oer basic application monitoring that focuses on process level information. While this is helpful, it leaves out services, event logs, and application counters that are important for understanding health and performance. They also do not provide any specific Linux application monitoring. Physical Network and Storage Much of what impacts a virtual environment or application can be attributed to storage or networking issues. While there are products that specifically monitor these devices and their interactions quite well, they generally do not give you all of the important virtual environment and application level information needed to pinpoint issues and get to the root cause. Therefore, having insight into physical storage and networks bandwidth, packet information, latency, port availability, etc. can be critical to seeing the big picture. PHD Virtual can quickly and easily configure SNMP monitoring of storage and network devices for bandwidth, packet, latency, and availability at the port level. This allows users to correlate issues reported within applications and servers to any potential infrastructure issues that could be causing a bottleneck or outage. By combining all of this visibility into a single interface, administrators have objective evidence to show other organizations where issues are occurring in order to streamline the remediation process.

5 Security and Compliance Some industries require strict compliance for data and processes. Therefore, it can be very important to monitor event logs, syslogs, and even certain files for changes with the ability to report against that information for auditing purposes. These capabilities allow users to be compliant with many industry standards, such as Sarbanes Oxley and PCI. PHD Virtual is one of the only vendors that can perform detailed event log and syslog monitoring of devices a capability missing from virtual environment-specific monitoring tools. Additionally, PHD Virtual can monitor specific files for changes to ensure that anything archived has not been altered. If an unexpected change occurs, PHD Virtual Monitor can alert the user. While it does not always seem like a core function of an infrastructure monitoring solution, security and compliance monitoring adds even more enterprise value to a powerful product. Cost As always, tradeos must be made between functionality and cost when purchasing a monitoring solution. This tradeo directly impacts the value of the solution. PHD Virtual Monitor oers the most robust, comprehensive monitoring at a fraction of the cost of most competitors. Large enterprise solutions, such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, can monitor just about anything. However, they are expensive and require longterm training to be able to unlock their true value. PHD Virtual oers much of what SCOM can oer at only a fraction of the cost and time to implement. Meanwhile, other virtualization specific solutions limit their scope in visibility, leaving blind spots that can negatively impact application and IT service availability and performance. Robust visibility at a fraction of the cost. This is the core of PHD Virtual Monitor s value, and it is unmatched. To learn more about how you can take advantage of our unmatched value, please contact PHD Virtual by calling toll-free 1 (866) , us at: SALES@PHDVIRTUAL.COM or visit our website at PHD Virtual Technologies MAIN WEB info@phdvirtual.com North America Headquarters 2 Penn Center 1500 JFK Boulevard, Suite 222 Philadelphia, PA 19102