ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company, today announced a new, storage-level mapping feature for Applications Manager, its application performance monitoring solution. Available now, the new feature automatically maps VMware vSphere servers and their virtual machines (VMs) to their underlying physical storage arrays. Armed with maps of the VMware-to-storage relationships, IT administrators have better end-to-end visibility into the performance of their virtual resources.

ManageEngine is demonstrating the latest enhancements to Applications Manager and exhibiting the rest of its IT management portfolio in booth 2410 at VMworld 2013, which continues through August 29 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The company is also demonstrating just-announced upgrades to Site24x7, the cloud infrastructure monitoring service, and preparing to announce major upgrades for OpManager, the network performance management software, and for Password Manager Pro, its privileged password management software.

Storage is one of the most critical components of a virtual infrastructure, and storage-related issues are common in virtualization projects. To maximize performance and reliability, IT operations teams must monitor the virtual servers and the applications they host as well as the storage they're implementing. VMs, however, constantly move across physical hosts and storage devices, and the dynamic VM activity has a detrimental impact on troubleshooting and performance monitoring. To complicate the IT team's challenge, traditional monitoring solutions focus on virtualization at the application level or the storage level, but not both.

"Today, we're moving beyond the silo views that performance monitors typically create," said Sridhar Iyengar, vice president of product management at ManageEngine. "The VM-to-physical storage mapping in Applications Manager gives users the big picture with visibility into the relationships between VMs and storage arrays. The improved insight enhances the effectiveness of performance monitoring and troubleshooting efforts alike."

VMware Storage Mapping and More

The new mapping feature in Applications Manager is enabled by enhanced integration with OpStor, the storage monitoring software from ManageEngine. Applications Manager combines its application and VM performance data with OpStor's storage performance data to automatically generate maps that track the vSphere servers and their VMs to the datastores, to the host bus adapters and the actual physical storage.

IT operations teams that want the VM-to-storage maps must run both products, and when they do, they will gain a complete performance view across all resources in the virtualized infrastructure that quickly determine if a performance problem is at the storage or application level and then efficiently troubleshoot, pinpoint the root cause and resolve the problem.

In another use case, IT teams can be notified of capacity issues related to excessive disk activity generated by VMs approaching the throughput capacity limit of the host bus adapter. IT staff can then use the VM-to-storage maps to move VMs around to ease the strain on storage. Similarly, IT staff can refer to the maps before performing storage maintenance to identify and mitigate any negative impact on the related VMs.

Beyond the new mapping capability, Applications Manager now monitors new key performance indicators (KPIs) of VMware vSphere servers and their VMs. The new KPI monitoring includes metrics about processes, resource pools or clusters, services and event logs in virtual machines. The new KPI information can help IT admins allocate resources more effectively, bring VM sprawl under control, improve maintenance scheduling and other management tasks.

Ultimately, the new VMware monitoring will also help IT teams:

• maximize ROI and maintain high VM performance
• track user experience before and after virtualization projects
• plan capacity and make educated decisions on resource allocation
• improve operational efficiency in virtual environments

Pricing and Availability

Applications Manager is available immediately with prices starting at $795 for up to 25 servers or applications for the Professional Edition. A free, fully functional, 30-day trial version is available at http://ow.ly/7evOs.