Why I Stopped Using vCenter Alarms and Built My Own Monitoring
vCenter’s built-in alerting is fine until it isn’t. Here’s how I replaced it with a lightweight stack that actually tells me what matters.
Monitoring
VMware vSphere Health Checks: Building a Weekly Operational Routine
The best VMware environments I’ve managed didn’t stay healthy by accident — they had a consistent operational review process that caught problems before they became incidents. A weekly health check routine doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it does need to be consistent. The 15-Minute Weekly Review Every Monday morning before business hours, I run … Read more
Performance Baselining in vSphere: What to Measure and When to Act
“The VMs are slow” is the most common call I get about VMware environments, and it’s almost never useful information on its own. What I need to know — and rarely have if nobody’s been tracking it — is what “slow” means relative to baseline. Performance baselining is the practice of capturing normal behavior metrics … Read more
Exchange 2013 Performance Monitoring: What to Watch and When to Worry
Exchange 2013’s new Information Store architecture — where each database runs in its own worker process (Microsoft.Exchange.Store.Worker.exe) — changes what you monitor compared to Exchange 2010. Problems are more isolated, which is good, but your monitoring approach needs to account for per-database process tracking rather than a single monolithic store. The Counters That Actually Matter … Read more