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Home > Network Monitoring > Best Microsoft Hyper-V monitoring tools
April 08, 2024
Virtualization has become indispensable for modern enterprises of all sizes, serving as the backbone of their IT infrastructure. Virtual machines (VMs) play a pivotal role by seamlessly connecting servers and workstations across networks, and Hyper-V, Microsoft’s Virtualization Solution, is a key player in this market.
However, managing virtualized environments presents unique challenges for IT administrators, as hypervisors consume resources differently than physical hardware. To ensure optimal performance and resource allocation, administrators require robust and specialized monitoring solutions that can provide real-time insights into the health and performance of their Hyper-V environments.
In this comprehensive guide, we delve into the top Hyper-V monitoring tools, each offering a set of features tailored to meet the diverse needs of modern enterprises. From performance optimization to proactive maintenance and regulatory compliance, these tools equip administrators with the capabilities needed to streamline operations and mitigate potential risks.
Furthermore, we explore key considerations when selecting Hyper-V monitoring tools, highlighting essential features such as comprehensive monitoring capabilities, customizable alerts, and native reporting functionalities. Additionally, we provide insights into the monitoring process itself, offering guidance on how to effectively monitor Hyper-V environments to maximize efficiency and performance.
Whether you’re an IT professional seeking to enhance the management of your virtual infrastructure or a business decision-maker evaluating monitoring solutions, this guide serves as a valuable resource to navigate the complexities of Hyper-V monitoring and optimize your virtualized environment for success.
Hyper-V, developed by Microsoft, is a virtualization technology that allows users to create and run multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a physical host. It functions as a hypervisor, creating an abstraction layer between the virtual operating systems and the physical host, enabling efficient management of VMs.
This technology has many benefits, among them the consolidation of servers and workloads onto fewer, more powerful physical computers, leading to reduced power consumption and storage space usage. It also supports the establishment or expansion of a virtual desktop infrastructure, simplifying regulatory compliance by managing desktop operating systems and applications efficiently.
Hyper-V monitoring tools are essential for managing and optimizing virtualized environments. These tools provide features like monitoring CPU and memory load, disk usage, network capacity, performance counters, alerting for various metrics, detailed performance reports, tracking resource consumption, managing virtual processors, monitoring virtual network adapters, storage analysis, VM management, and automation of VM actions based on thresholds. They play a crucial role in ensuring optimal performance, resource allocation, and troubleshooting within Hyper-V environments
There are many reasons to invest in Hyper-V monitoring. Here are five of them, in no particular order.
Broadly speaking, there are 5 main features you need to look out for when choosing Hyper-V monitoring tools. Keep in mind that this may vary according to your specific needs.
Monitoring Hyper-V environments involves several key steps to ensure optimal performance, resource utilization, and troubleshooting capabilities. These include the identification of monitoring objectives, tool selection, deployment and configuration, definition of key metrics to be monitored, setting up of alerts, analysis of performance trends, and regular maintenance and review, to name a few.
By following these steps, you can establish a robust monitoring strategy for your Hyper-V environment. There are many Hyper-V monitoring tools to allow you to accomplish this task, from as many different vendors. We present a few of them below, in no particular order.
Paessler offers PRTG, a sensor-based solution for monitoring Hyper-V. The application offers a wide range of sensors designed to monitor host servers, virtual machines and virtualized storage devices and network adapters, and can be deployed as an on-premises or cloud application.
It can monitor virtual machines and their hosts in detail with its powerful Hyper-V sensors and visualizes the data obtained in customizable dashboards. This allows you to comfortably retrieve important information for planning, testing and monitoring virtual environments.
PRTG alerts you immediately when your virtual environments need your attention. Sensors can be set up quickly and easily, allowing you to adjust your network as needed and quickly analyze the relevant data in each case. PRTG helps you detect errors fast and react to them efficiently.
PRTG Network Monitor is available either with perpetual licenses (starting at US$ 1.899) or subscription licenses (starting at US$ 159 monthly), a flexible and affordable pricing scheme when compared with other tools. A 30-day free trial is available. There is also a free version for personal use that lets you monitor up to 100 sensors at no charge.
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Applications Manager’s Hyper-V monitoring software provides visibility into the resource utilization of Hyper-V infrastructure, which in turn helps in capacity planning. With out-of-the-box reports, graphical views, alarms, thresholds and comprehensive fault management capabilities, IT administrators can maximize Hyper-V server uptime and ensure their Hyper-V environment runs at peak performance.
This tool supports multivendor virtualization solutions (including VMWare and Citrix XenServer), enabling management from a single console. Key monitoring metrics include CPU usage, system services, memory usage, networking and virtual network statistics, storage metrics, and top Hyper-V servers.
This provides visibility into resource utilization for capacity planning and maximizes server uptime with reports, alarms, thresholds, and fault management capabilities. Furthermore, end-user monitoring offers insights into user experience before and after virtualization projects.
ManageEngine Applications Manager is available in a subscription (SaaS, Software as a Service) or perpetual licensing model, in two editions: Professional (for small to medium businesses) and Enterprise (which can scale to more than 500 apps and 10,000 monitors). A 30-day free trial of both editions is available. There is also a “free forever” edition that supports up to 5 monitors.
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a powerful virtual machine (VM) monitoring tool built to consolidate a variety of useful observations in one interface. VMAN can provide you with comprehensive visibility into the health and performance of VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, whether they’re on-premises, hyper-converged, hybrid, or in the cloud.
It allows you to easily manage the health of your entire environment — whether it’s server, virtual, or storage infrastructure — and troubleshoot specific, interrelated problems from a single-pane-of-glass view, with real-time dashboards that help identify and troubleshoot performance, capacity, and configuration issues.
Features like VM sprawl alerts and recommendations help you identify and reclaim wasted space and performance, and recommendations allow you to address active or potential performance issues, which can be executed immediately or scheduled for later. You can also execute various management actions, such as powering on/off VMs, suspending, rebooting, taking and deleting snapshots, and migrating VMs to different hosts or datastores directly from VMAN’s interface, leading to more efficiency on issue resolution.
Like other SolarWinds products, Virtualization Manager is available on a subscription or perpetual licensing scheme, with prices available by quote. A 30-day free trial and interactive demo are available.
Datadog monitors all your virtual Hyper-V machines in one place — regardless of whether they’re spread across thousands of clusters, data centers, and geographic locations. Improve performance with end-to-end monitoring and real-time alerts from Datadog.
The platform offers real-time metrics and alerts to identify abandoned or inactive virtual machines, correlate key VM metrics with load balancer metrics, deployment events, and logs for faster root cause analysis, and proactively identify capacity issues. Users can ensure proper resource allocation and right-sizing in the cloud with high-granularity CPU, RAM, storage, and resource utilization metrics.
It also helps in discovering underutilized on-premise and cloud servers via real-time, auto-generated host maps, and reducing unnecessary compute, storage, or data transfer costs by combining performance metrics with critical cost data.
Datadog provides machine-learning alerts to automatically detect abnormal VM behavior compared to baseline utilization trends, predict resource shortages, and alert on anomalies and outliers accounting for daily, weekly, and seasonal fluctuations. Users can quickly identify and resolve performance issues with real-time service maps, AI-powered synthetic monitors, alerts on performance issues, end-to-end application tracing, latency breakdowns, continuous profiling, and real user monitoring.
Datadog is SaaS (Software as a Service). VM monitoring is part of the Infrastructure package, starting at US$ 15 per host, per month. A Free option, which can monitor only 5 hosts and retains data for 1 day, is available, as well as a 30-day free trial.
LogicMonitor provides in-depth, agentless monitoring of your entire virtualization stack in a snap. Automatic discovery of Hyper-V virtual machines, hypervisors, and hosts — requiring no manual configuration or additional hardware — provides in-depth analysis and visualization within minutes.
It offers monitoring for thousands of clusters across multiple data centers globally, simplifying your VM strategy with a single-pane-of-glass view. Intelligent thresholds built on machine learning warn you of impending issues affecting your virtual machines and provide recommendations to improve performance and meet your SLAs.
By correlating critical VM metrics with other infrastructure aspects, real-time alerts, and SLA monitoring, LogicMonitor helps improve VM performance and service health. AI features for dynamic thresholds, root cause analysis, proactive issue prevention, and automated forecasting help you ensure uptime, and dashboards for right-sizing VM infrastructure allow you to identify resource bottlenecks and prevent service-impacting problems, saving time, money, and resources.
LogicMonitor is SaaS, available in many plans with different pricing and feature sets. Hyper-V monitoring is part of the Infrastructure Monitoring plan, which starts at US$ 22 per resource, per month, billed annually. A free trial is available.
eG Enterprise Hyper-V Performance Monitor enables complete transparency over Hyper-V infrastructure. This solution informs you about resource health, status, CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage, network usage, and I/O activity of servers.
Through auto-baselining, proactive alerts, and automatic correlation across different metrics, users can have total visibility, deep insights into virtual application performance, and powerful reporting capabilities.
All the collected information can be displayed in real time dashboards, and due to pre-configured thresholds, issues can be detected very early. Detailed reports, along with intelligent VM-to-host mapping, aid in analyzing problems such as logon slowness and poor user experience.
Pricing for eG Enterprise is based on the deployment model, and users can choose between SaaS/Cloud, Subscriptions or Perpetual Licenses. Subscriptions start at US$ 100 per month, with detailed pricing available by quote. A 30-day free trial is available.
Site24x7 offers a Hyper-V monitoring tool designed to optimize the health and performance of Hyper-V servers. The tool enables auto-discovery and analysis of Hyper-V setups across various hierarchical levels, monitoring critical parameters related to virtual machines, hosts, and other virtualized components.
This tool provides a complete overview of the Hyper-V environment, including an aggregate summary of all active, down, and troubled virtual machines, along with their CPU/memory usage and processor count.
Administrators can oversee individual VMs, measure processor performance, monitor virtual network adapters and switches, and analyze storage issues affecting performance. Management capabilities include setting startup and resource allocation parameters for VMs, as well as automating start/stop/restart actions based on threshold violations.
Site24x7 is SaaS available in many subscription plans and tiers, depending on the features you need. The Pro tier of the All-In-One plan starts at US$ 35 per month, paid annually. A 30-day free trial is available.
The VirtualMetric Hyper-V monitoring solution provides detailed statistics for your Host Usage, including CPU Load and Usage, Free Memory and Storage reports, Storage IOPS, Network Usage and number of VMs per hosts. Everything is presented visually in easy-to-understand graphics and charts.
The smart combination of host usage together with agentless VM usage monitoring helps you to control your Hyper-V environment easily. It gives you comprehensive and up-to-date information regarding every single VM within your Hyper-V infrastructure.
Monitoring of storage latency helps you identify and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks affecting Hyper-V virtual machines, and detailed reports on Hyper-V snapshots allow you to manage and optimize their usage effectively.
It also offers inventory reports on virtual HBA usage to troubleshoot problematic VMs efficiently, monitors the success of Hyper-V replicas with notifications and alerts for disaster recovery preparedness, and offers historical data and performance statistics for Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volumes, including latency, IOPS, disk usage, and more.
Pricing is not immediately available on VirtualMetric’s website, so you will probably have to request a quote. There is a 30-day free trial available.
Developed by IBM, Turbonomic is another virtualization management tool that can monitor Hyper-V, among other applications. It can be used to monitor storage and network usage of Hyper-V resources to avoid poor performance. Dashboards displaying this information can easily be replicated and shared with other teams or decision makers.
This tool claims to help in reducing application performance costs, automation of operations, resource optimization, scenario planning and the elimination of data fragmentation due to siloed teams, thanks to AI-powered insights
A special feature that Turbonomic offers is capacity planning. This simulates environmental changes caused by new workloads to determine if the resources currently in use can sustain the planned usage. Based on this, a decision can then be made whether to limit or increase capacity. This can reduce the time required for provisioning virtual resources and optimizing the use of virtual machines.
Turbonomic is available in two plans: Essentials, for startups and growing businesses, and Standard, for Enterprises. However, it is really expensive, starting at US$ 40,000 per year on the standard plan. SMBs need not apply.
Acronis Cloud Manager (formerly 5Nine Cloud Manager) is a solid solution for data center deployments on the Microsoft Cloud Platform in Microsoft Hyper-V-only environments. It caters to diverse configurations, including single and multi-tenant public, private, and hybrid cloud setups, and helps organizations tackle challenges such as security, cloud expenditure management, and governance.
Key features include agentless management and full virtual machine (VM) lifecycle management. It aims to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) by managing all Microsoft Cloud resources from a single solution, thus eliminating the need for multiple management tools, and helps mitigate security and privacy risks by offering role-based access control (RBAC) and network and security monitoring.
Furthermore, Cloud Manager offers a highly customizable dashboard that can be created with different user accounts and access rights. This has the advantage that customers can be provided with a dashboard customized specifically for them.
Pricing for Acronis Cloud Manager is only available by quote. A 14-free trial is available.
Among all these Hyper-V monitoring tools, our favorite is Paessler PRTG, since it allows you to streamline your workflow by enabling you to monitor all of your infrastructure with a single tool.
The built-in sensors cover many of the main use cases, without the need to purchase extras, so it can monitor your Hyper-V virtual machines, but also your network, services, servers, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, and much more.
Its extensibility is also a highlight: sensors can be combined as needed, and you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs. That means you can do away with having to rely on a variety of individualized solutions, which can carry potential risks such as conflict with your current workflow and even network security issues.
Last, but not least, flexible (and affordable) pricing helps it fit into budgets of all sizes. No other tool “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics.
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