There is a new kid in town when it comes to infrastructure monitoring.  Opvizor is a pretty neat little solution for identifying issues in your environment before they become a problem.  The install was simple enough, only requiring me to run an installer and connect it to my vCenter Server.  Once that was done, it was a matter of clicking a button to scan and upload my data back to Opvizor’s servers (anonymized data of course).  These uploads are scheduled to prevent all this manual nonsense, but I couldn’t wait to see what my environment looked like so I uploaded it right away.

Here’s what you could expect to see after an upload.  NOTE: Of course I wouldn’t have had any errors in my lab, so I had to conjure some up just for a test. 🙂

The graphical user interface is pretty slick and very responsive.  From the main screen, you can get a quick view of your environment and what might be wrong with it.  If you drill down into individual issues, you can get a really detailed description of why it’s marked as an issue.  From there, it also explains how to modify the environment to mitigate the threat, or you can mark that threat as not important, maybe because you have a darn good reason for the settings being the way they are.

My favorite part of the tool, was not only did it show you how to make a configuration change, but it would also show you the powershell code to fix the issue across your entire environment if you wanted to do it!  This makes these types of reconfigurations a snap to resolve.

You could also check out some of the reporting features.  There are reports for compute, networking, storage, issues, memory and others in either PDF, HTML or CSV format.

The last thing I noticed was the capability to see how your environment stacks up against the average ones.

Summary

Overall, I like the idea of using big data analytics to resolve issues, and it’s nice to be able to see some averages, but you must always be careful with that data.  Just because everyone is doing it, doesn’t make it right.

The tool is very easy to use and can give some very quick insight into an environment as well as ongoing configuration management.  If you’re interested, check it out for yourself.  There is a free trial available and some other tools like the recently released “Snapwatcher“.