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Managing

Virtual System Inventories in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor

After a Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter server is added as an Element to Uptime Infrastructure Monitor, you can manually manage all of its inventory. By default, all of a VMware vCenter’s components—ESX hosts and clusters, and their child VMs—are monitored by Uptime Infrastructure Monitor. The same is true for a Hyper-V host server's guest VMs. As a central monitoring configuration point, the VMware vCenter host Element gives you the ability to determine which VMs are monitored in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor and as a consequence, which Hyper-V or VMware vSphere metrics are kept in the DataStore.

You can select VMs or a Hyper-V or an ESX host to be "ignored" by Uptime Infrastructure Monitor. When VMs are ignored, their topological relationship to other VMware vCenter virtual system components is retained, but their metrics are no longer recorded to the DataStore, and they no longer count toward your license.

As the topology of your virtual infrastructure changes, you can change the contents of the ignore list. Historical data for VM Elements are retained in the DataStore, regardless if they are currently monitored or ignored, allowing administrators to continue to perform diagnosis on a continuously changing virtual environment.

Although there are no resource-related reasons why you would not want Uptime Infrastructure Monitor to monitor all Hyper-V host and ESX servers in your virtual infrastructure, other factors may dictate your monitoring policies:

• because the VMs on your Hyper-V or ESX servers count toward your Uptime Infrastructure Monitor license, you may have resource monitoring restrictions that require prioritization
• you are not interested in keeping performance metrics for some parts of your virtual infrastructure (e.g., some VMs are used for testing, and are not considered mission-critical)
• similarly, as ignored VMs do not appear in live monitoring pages in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor such as Global Scan or the Resource Scan dashboards, you may want to exclude non-essential VMs to avoid cluttering the views

On the Hyper-V host or VMware vCenter Element’s Info page, you can view its complete inventory, broken down by logical groupings created in the vSphere Client (e.g., by datacenter). It is here you can add or remove Hyper-V or ESX hosts or VMs (as individual machines, or in groups at the datacenter or cluster level) from the ignore list.

For license management, ignoring or monitoring a parent object correspondingly frees up or uses license spots for all of its child objects, provided there is space. For example, if the  VMware vCenter Element is configured to Collect Virtual Machine data, adding an ESX host automatically includes its VMs, each of which counts toward your license. Consider the following outcomes:

• if there is enough license space for the Hyper-V or ESX host and all of its VMs, they are monitored
• if there is no more license space, the ESX host and all of its VMs are added (with its hierarchy intact) to the list of ignored Elements
• if there is license space for some of the Elements, the ESX host hosts are added and monitored, and each child VM is added to the monitored list until license space has run out; the remaining VMs are added to the list of ignored Elements

Once VMware vCenter these objects are added, you can manage license usage by moving Elements from monitored inventories to lists of ignored Elements, or vice versa.