Glyn Heath, Founder of Centiq Ltd, speaks to IT Advisor.

The benefits of IT monitoring and the early warning of system issues.

monitoring, managing and mitigating risk

I've been asked this question quite a lot lately, and to be honest I've been a bit stumped, other than a  gut feeling that monitoring from the OS as well as the VMware layer is a good idea, I had little else to offer the argument. So I figured I should take a more serious look at the monitoring available within VMware vCenter and come up with a more compelling argument. Perhaps the more seasoned VMware admins out their could comment to offer their thoughts on the topic?

vCenter for VMware provides an excellent selection of performance graphs enabling you to track the CPU, memory, network and I/O consumption for each VM as well as the ESX host itself. You can also set "alarms" that trigger e-mail notifications. So why would I ever need an additional agent based OS monitoring package? What more could you possibly need? Do the OS metrics become less important in a VM world?