Virtualization Monitoring with NetCrunch 11

There is no shortage of monitoring solutions on the market that allow businesses to manage their business-critical resources, including virtualized environments. Monitoring is a key task supporting business-critical operations in the enterprise. Arguably, monitoring is even more important with virtualized environments due to the highly consolidated nature of the infrastructure. With the shared components and resources, it is important to keep an eye on key performance metrics (KPIs) in the environment. This post will take a look at virtualization monitoring with NetCrunch 11, a powerful monitoring solution for virtualized environments that provides many capabilities and features. We will look specifically at the new features of NetCrunch version 11 in this review of new features.

What is NetCrunch?

Adremsoft NetCrunch is a self-described highly scalable and flexible network monitoring system. It can monitor physical devices, network metrics, virtualized environments, and many other types of objects. NetCrunch provides a robust solution that delivers on the following key concepts:

• High performance
• Automatic monitoring using policy management
• Built for consistency
• Flexibility and customization

NetCrunch has a unique approach to how it monitors your environments. It uses what it calls “Monitoring Packs” which provide a predefined set of performance metrics, triggers, and events that it monitors. NetCrunch automatically assigns the appropriate monitoring packs to devices it discovers in the network scans, however, the monitoring packs can be assigned both automatically and manually.

One of the great things I like about NetCrunch is it is priced based on nodes instead of individual probes per node. As we all know, a business-critical resource may have many components that need to be continuously checked. In other solutions, each would require different monitoring probes. With NetCrunch this is all-inclusive in the “node-based” licensing. Even if you are checking 100 different things for a particular node, this only counts as one node.

Installation requirements

The following requirements are listed as recommended from Adremsoft for the NetCrunch server installation:

• NetCrunch must be installed on a 64 bit Windows Server (Windows 2012, Windows 2012R2, Windows 2016, 2019). It comes with its own Web Server and an embedded SQL database for storing monitoring event data.
• NetCrunch can be installed on a virtual machine, provided you assign at least 4 cores and 4 GB RAM.
• More processors are better for monitoring 1000+ nodes; the recommended number in such cases is at least 8.
  Monitoring a large number of performance metrics (100,000 network interfaces) requires additional RAM (500,000 performance metrics will require an additional 4GB).
• The other important component is the hard drive. We strongly recommend using SSD drives.

NetCrunch 11 New Features

The last couple of releases with version 11 have been minor bugfix releases. However, the NetCrunch 11.02 release contained major new features and functionality, including the following. I have bolded the ones that relate specifically to virtualization. However, there are many great new additions to the NetCrunch version 11 family of the product.

New Features & Improvements

• Event Log Analytics Views Provides a comprehensive view on typical time ranges (24hr, 7 days, and 30 days) providing various summary views.
• IP Tools for Desktop and Web 12 IP Tools that can be run locally (desktop) or remotely (from NC server or any Remote Probe)
• Improved Camera Sensor Camera sensor supports now several new alerts such as ` Alert if the camera image could have been tampered`, ` Alert if the camera image differs from the reference image` and alert `On motion detection`
• Improved DICOM C-ECHO Sensor supports `Calling EA title` and `Called EA title` configuration.
• Improved Event Log History View New history view offers broad view on alert history (event log) and allows ad hoc analysis providing quick filtering and grouping.
• Improved Notifications NetCrunch now integrates with Windows 10 notification system offering a much better experience. Notifications are also present in the web console window now.
• Improved Remote Probe Remote Probe is now capable of monitoring: ESXi, vCenter, Windows, Linux, Mac OS, BSD, Solaris, SNMP Traps, Syslog Messages, Web Messages, Generic Agent Requests, IPSLA, 70+ Sensors, 70+ Networks Services, and over 150 Monitoring Packs
• Improved Windows Monitoring Windows can be monitored by RPC (remote registry – recommended) or by WMI
• Monitoring Pack – Basic Windows Authorization Monitoring Generating an alert in case of multiple failed login events happening over a short time, when logon attempt was made with explicit credentials or with special privileges assigned.
• Monitoring Pack – Basic Windows GPO Monitoring Tracking changes in Group/Domain/Authorization Policies, generating an alert when such an event occurs.
• Monitoring Pack – Cisco Meraki Cloud Controller (SNMP) Shows a collection of statistics from interfaces. Detects and informs about many important events like rogue DHCP server, client IP conflicts, cable errors, and others
• Monitoring Pack – HW group – Damocles (SNMP) Shows values gathered from Damocles sensors. It can display information from metrics related to water, gas, electricity, and others.
• Monitoring Pack – HW group – PWR (SNMP) Designed to monitor external M-Bus meters on HWG-PWR devices
• Monitoring Pack – HW group – STE (SNMP) Collects values of temperature and humidity from external sensors
• Monitoring Pack – HW group – STE2 (SNMP) Similar to the ‘HW group – STE (SNMP)’. This Monitoring Pack contains a report that allows to display values from temperature and humidity sensors
• Monitoring Pack – HW group – WLD (SNMP) Reports about water leak detections
• Monitoring Pack – NVIDIA Quadro GPU Dedicated for NVIDIA Quadro graphic cards. Alerts about high GPU, Memory, and Bus usage. Shows metrics also from Core Clock, Fan Speed, Temperature, and Power Consumption.
• Monitoring Pack – ZyXel USG Flex (SNMP) Alerts when Memory, Flash, or CPU usage is high. Gathers information from VPN.
• Notes View See aggregated notes from all nodes of selected Atlas view.
• Reporting Enhancements New Report Viewer and enhanced reporting capabilities for performance reports
• Support for timezones Support for NetCrunch server, probes, and console located in different time zones.
• Unified Trend Viewer which provides same user experience for desktop and web console
• Update Apache Web Server Monitor supports monitoring of latest Apache servers
• Web Console Update Includes notification, trend viewer, better grid views, external events and many more…
• vCenter Monitoring New sensor allows monitoring ESX hosts through vCenter.

Virtualization Monitoring with NetCrunch 11

NetCrunch provides a great solution for virtualization monitoring including both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. In the lab environment, I have NetCrunch monitoring my VMware vSphere 7 environment.

The NetCrunch solution provides you with a monitoring atlas that gives you a global overview of your environment in a single pane of glass. I like the use of color and categorization in NetCrunch Network Atlas. In a single dashboard, you have a view of the monitoring packs, devices, alerts, and other metrics.

Netcrunch network atlas dashboard

Under the Monitoring > Monitoring Packs & Policies menu, you can see the list of monitoring packs available. Again, NetCrunch provides a large number of monitoring packs by default. With every few minor releases, NetCrunch continues to add to the available monitoring packs that are available.

Monitoring packs and policies

Putting more laser focus on virtualization monitoring, NetCrunch has a large variety of classification tabs in the Network Atlas that allows easily monitoring your specific virtualization environments. As you can see, you have an ESXi tab. Clicking here will display the ESXi hosts in the environment. Again these are automatically discovered and have the ESXi monitoring packs applied.

Network atlas in netcrunch categorized by system types 1 1

There is also a tab for Hyper-V in the environment. NetCrunch has a monitoring pack for Hyper-V.

Hyper v monitoring in netcrunch atlas

Below is the ESXi/VM tab displaying the virtual machines running on the ESXi hosts.

Esxi vm monitoring

If you take a look at the status of an ESXi host, you get a great deal of detailed information regarding the host’s health. This includes the processor and memory utilization, virtual machines, RTT time, and max RTT. You can see if you have any monitoring alerts or other issues with the host as well.

Esxi host status in netcrunch monitoring

Focusing in on performance even further, if you click on the performance tab, you will see the more detailed metrics and information displayed.

Drilling into the performance of an esxi host

NetCrunch helps eliminate alerting “noise”

NetCrunch provides what they call Conditional Alerts and Alert Correlation. With the conditional alerts, you can alert based on:

• the event condition
• the event happens over a period of time
• the event happened more than x number of times in y minutes
• the event happened only between the time of or not between a certain time
• the event did not happen in the time between
• the event did not happen after a given time
• event pending for more than a specified period of time

Event Correlation in NetCrunch means triggered alerts are automatically correlated. When the condition causing the alert is no longer present, a closing event is triggered and the alert is closed. This helps to auto-manage pending alerts that may no longer be in alert status. NetCrunch also has the ability to do advanced correlation to define alerts triggered when alerts from multiple sources coincide together.

Wrapping Up

Making use of virtualization monitoring with NetCrunch 11 provides a powerful monitoring solution that organizations can take advantage of with their virtualized environments, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. NetCrunch offers a lot of great functionality including Monitoring packs, conditional alerts, and alert correlation built-in.

NetCrunch licensing is also easy to calculate as they only charge you per node, no matter how many metrics for that node you are monitoring. Be sure to check out more about NetCrunch 11 here.