PHD Virtual Technologies, pioneer in virtual machine backup and recovery, and innovator of virtualization monitoring solutions, announced the release of PHD Virtual Monitor Version 10.3. The latest version of this robust virtual infrastructure monitoring tool provides key enhancements in the areas of business reporting and remote monitoring. This update now makes it even easier and faster to solve complex monitoring issues.

PHD Virtual Monitor Version 10.3 adds considerable flexibility and granularity for virtual environment reporting. Users now have the ability to pick and choose from many different metrics for hosts, VM’s, and virtual storage and then select any of these virtual items to report those metrics against. PHD Virtual Monitor enables users to schedule these reports at predefined times or run them on demand. Reports can be emailed, stored on disk, or viewed right in the PHD Virtual Monitor User Interface.

Christian Schiff from Woodharbor Custom Cabinetry, based in Mason City, Iowa is a long time PHD Virtual Backup customer, and recent PHD Virtual Monitor customer. He recently discussed what piqued his interest in the new version of PHD Virtual Monitor. “I was using VKernal at the time, but was looking for more comprehensive coverage of my virtual environment,” he said. “I found PHD Virtual’s combination of agent and agentless monitoring, along with the new enhanced reporting capabilities a much better fit.”

Included in this release are enhancements to remote site monitoring. “Many distributed enterprises and cloud providers face challenges in monitoring the virtual environment outside of their core infrastructure,” said Paul Throldahl, VP of Worldwide Sales. He continued, “In order to effectively monitor their virtual hosts remotely, administrators often deploy secondary instances of their monitoring solution which adds management overhead, and cost, as that typically involves adding a proxy or secondary server.”

With the latest version of PHD Virtual Monitor 10.3, users have the ability to configure any (Windows) PHD Virtual Intelligent Agent to collect hypervisor API metrics and send them back to the central PHD Virtual Monitor server. IT professional can designate any agent at a remote site a “master agent” and it will monitor remote hypervisors and surrounding infrastructure, sending exception based alerts through the firewall when predetermined thresholds are breached. “The best part is that it does all this without the need to add hardware at the secondary site,” concluded Throldahl. “This is especially helpful to cloud providers and organizations that manage large multi-site environments.”

James Legg, CEO of PHD Virtual, has seen the evolution of these types of tools in the industry. “Organizations have long leveraged infrastructure monitoring and reporting tools in the physical world,” he said. “However, now that many aspects of IT have gone virtual, the market lacks a single tool that can provide a detailed look of performance metrics for both physical and virtual configurations. PHD Virtual Monitor provides that centralized view and we have enhanced it further in the latest version 10.3. By adding deeper reporting capabilities and more effective remote site monitoring, we’re continuing our mission to save customers time and money, and help them improve service levels.”