Best Microsoft Hyper-V monitoring tools

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July 21, 2022

Virtualization is an integral part of modern enterprises, regardless of size. Virtual machines are business critical as they connect both servers and workstations on the network. Depending on the company, virtual machines are used for many different purposes. Virtualization offers countless benefits, but also presents IT administrators with complex and unique challenges. This is because hypervisors often consume resources in different ways than physical hardware. Memory, storage, LUNs, network interfaces and other hardware must be managed and monitored.

Admins need to know what’s going on in their virtual infrastructure and how to always optimize it. Errors and problems, whether virtual or physical, need to be detected and resolved quickly before there are serious consequences. This is exactly where monitoring solutions come into play.

Here are the best Microsoft Hyper-V monitoring tools.

1 – Paessler PRTG

Paessler offers PRTG, a sensor-based solution for monitoring Hyper-V. The application offers a wide range of sensors designed for this very purpose and can be deployed as an on-premises or cloud application. PRTG 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.

👉 https://www.paessler.com/de/monitor_hyper_v

PROCONS
🟢 Very easy and fast installation🔴 Very comprehensive solution with many
features that require time to learn
🟢 Almost unlimited possibilities to create dashboards/maps 
🟢 Permanently free of charge up to max. 100 sensors 

2 – SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

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, hyperconverged, hybrid, or in the cloud. 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.

👉 https://www.solarwinds.com/virtualization-manager

PROCONS
🟢 Scalable dashboards that can represent
multiple hosts in the environment
🔴 Designed for large enterprises
🟢 Monitoring of resources of individual VMs 
🟢 Provides capacity planning 

3 – Datadog Hyper-V Monitoring

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 Datadog system resides almost entirely in the cloud, except for an agent program that must be installed on the customer’s server. It can be enhanced with integrations – which is needed to Monitor Hyper-V implementations.

👉 https://www.datadoghq.com/dg/monitor/hyper-v-benefits

PROCONS
🟢 Includes many custom templates🔴 Free version capabilities are limited
🟢 Numerous add-ons available 
🟢 Automatic detection of network devices to create maps 

4 – ManageEngine Application Manager

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. The Hyper-V monitoring feature enables you to manage virtualization solutions from multiple vendors from a single management console.

👉 https://www.manageengine.com/products/applications_manager/hyper-v-monitoring.html

PROCONS
🟢 Provides many widgets to create dashboards and reports🔴 Significant time investment in the learning process
🟢 Supports bare metal environments 
🟢 Includes numerous alerting capabilities 

5 – LogicMonitor

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. Deliver uptime with LogicMonitor’s automated monitoring platform. 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.

👉 https://www.logicmonitor.com/virtual-machine-monitoring

PROCONS
🟢 Provides a high-level visual user interface🔴 Very limited time trial version
🟢 Supports multiple host environments 
🟢 It is available in 3 versions (Start, Pro and Enterprise) 

6 – eG Enterprise

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. This information can be displayed in a performance dashboard in real time. Due to pre-configured thresholds and auto-baselines, performance events can be detected very early.

👉 https://www.eginnovations.com/it-monitoring/microsoft-hyper-v-tools

PROCONS
🟢 Very well suited to large enterprises and MSPs🔴 Very well adapted for large companies
SMBs will most likely not use all features
🟢 Analyzes root causes to solve problems faster 
🟢 Alerting also on resource-related problems 

7 – Site24x7

Site24x7 is a cloud-based monitoring solution and has capabilities for monitoring Hyper-V implementations. For Hyper-V monitoring, a plugin is needed which is free to use. The tool can map the hypervisor structure, shows VM assignments and identifies resource allocations. The infrastructure package also provides the ability to show dependencies between applications. This can be useful for tracking activity from a front-end interface through applications such as Hyper-V to the server’s operating system to quickly find the root cause of problems. Site24x7 defines thresholds for all resources and alerts you if these were exceeded.

👉 https://www.site24x7.com/hyper-v-monitoring.html

PROCONS
🟢 Supports monitoring of clusters, VMs and host hardware🔴 Very detailed, which means some time
is required to learn all the functions
🟢 Freeware version available for in-depth testing 
🟢 Uses real-time data for device discovery 

8 – VirtualMetric

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.

👉 https://www.virtualmetric.com/hyper-v-monitoring/

PROCONS
🟢 Enables rule-based notifications and custom alarms🔴 Partly difficult to configure
🟢 Monitoring and display of event and security logs 
🟢 HTML-based real-time dashboard 

9 – Turbonomic

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.

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.

👉 https://www.turbonomic.com/integrations/hypervisors/microsoft-hyper-v/

PROCONS
🟢 Can be used for cloud-based VMs as
well as those in the local network
🔴 Does not provide auto discovery function
🟢 Very well-structured user interface 
🟢 Good dependency display capability 

10 – 5Nine Cloud Manager

5Nine is a solid solution for data center deployments on the Microsoft Cloud Platform in Microsoft Hyper-V-only environments. The tool integrates cloud-based Azure servers into the existing VM infrastructure. Due to its multi-tenancy capability, it can also enable the management of data from other companies.

Furthermore, 5Nine 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.

👉 https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/cloud-manager/

PROCONS
🟢 Recognizable interface, which is
reminiscent of Office products
🔴 No freeware version available
🟢 Good usability with different teams 
🟢 Supports multi-tenant environments