Virtual Servers Sensor Types

With PRTG you can monitor the vital parameters of VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V host servers and the virtual machines running on them. Also Amazon EC2 instances of Amazon AWS can be monitored via CloudWatch.

VMware Sensors

The sensor types for VMware are:

• VMware Host Server: Monitors a VMware ESX/ESXi Host Server (version 3.5 or vSphere 4.0)
• VMware Virtual Machine: Monitors a single virtual machine

While the Host Server sensor only works directly with an VMware ESX/ESXi server as its parent device you can use the Virtual Machine sensor in two ways:

• Use it to directly communicate with a VMware ESX/ESXi Host Server to monitor virtual machines running on this server.
• Use it to communicate with a VMware Virtual Center installation to monitor all virtual machines managed by this virtual center. Only this option supports virtual machines running on VMware Server 2.x and virtual machines that are under control of VMware's VMotion feature.

For VMware sensors PRTG needs an administrator login for the host server(s). You can enter these credentials in the VMware Credentials section for the parent device or group. The sensors will then inherit these settings.

Remarks

Due to performance limitations we recommend to keep the number of VMware sensors querying the same virtual server and using the same user account below 20. If you have more sensors you should use two or more user accounts or your should distribute the sensors across multiple probes.

VMware is a registered trademark of VMware Inc.

Microsoft Hyper-V Sensors

Hyper-V is the virtualization technology built into the latest Windows servers. With PRTG you can use two sensors to monitor Hyper-V Servers:

• Hyper-V Host Server: Monitors vital parameters of Hyper-V host servers.
• Hyper-V Virtual Machine: Monitors vital parameters of a single virtual machine on Hyper-V.

Amazon CloudWatch Sensor

If you are using Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) to host one or more servers then this new sensor is for you. Amazon offers the CloudWatch service for EC2 instances since May 2009 and it provides performance data for individual instances on EC2 (usage of this service costs a little extra).

1. Please use the Amazon AWS Management Console (http://aws.amazon.com/console/) to enable CloudWatch for the instance(s) that you want to monitor with PRTG.
2. In PRTG create a new device for your EC2 instance (if you don't have one already) and then add a new CloudWatch sensor to it. All you need to enter are your "AWS Access Key ID", "AWS Secret Access Key" and the "Instance ID". Click OK and your sensor will start automatically.
3. The Amazon CloudWatch sensors monitors CPU Utilization, Disk Read Ops, Disk Write Ops, Network In, Network Out.

You could also monitor the values "from the inside" by monitoring from the "guest operating system" itself. But using CloudWatch has two advantages:

• Operating system independence: You can monitor the vital system parameters regardless of the OS running on the instance.
• More security: You don't need to open any ports for monitoring requests to the instance.

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