August 15, 2007

With the increasing need for consolidation in IT organizations, many of our Longitude customers have asked us to add VMware monitoring capabilities to our product. In June, we added this comprehensive solution to our out-of-the-box application performance and network monitoring capabilities. The Longitude VMware solution provides the ability to check for:

• Excessive CPU utilization on individual virtual machines
• Excessive I/O rate on individual virtual machines and total rate across all machines
• Excessive network rates on individual virtual machines and total network rates across all virtual machines
• Low free memory on each virtual machine and across all virtual machines
• Low free space on the physical machine
• Whether each virtual machine is powered on

Many of our customers using this feature want to monitor their virtual environments to avoid overwhelming the physical server’s resources. By providing the capability to monitor virtual machines, Longitude V5 allows users to see the impact that the virtual machines have on the host machine to see if there is an overload issue.

The VMware capabilities also can be coupled with Longitude V5’s synthetic transactions to validate consolidation and/or virtualization. Since cost efficiency is a big part of effective service management, many IT departments are forced to consolidate. But saving money is only helpful if it can be done without having too much impact on user experience or SLAs. By starting with a baseline that relates user experience to service conditions, Longitude V5 users can get a complete picture for informed consolidation decisions. And they can ensure that usage does not overrun the available capacity of the physical hardware.

For more information about VMware capabilities in Longitude V5, you can post comments or questions to the blog and I will have them answered quickly.

Posted by: Dick Levin, VP of Product Development