Bridgeways has been working very hard this last year in coming back into their speed for creating management packs, updating existing ones, making them more intuitive and useful to work with, adding support staff and also hiring a very competent CTO (a good friend of mine and fellow MVP Simon Skinner :p ) who takes management pack quality very seriously. It is exciting to see the progress being made.
Today the new version of their VMWare monitoring management pack was released. It contains updated views and dashboards. The new style dashboards also were augmented with a few core dashboards:
- Host Performance: includes CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Swamp Memory Usage, Balloon Usage, Network Usage and Storage Usage data.
- CPU Performance: includes CPU Usage, Average CPU System Time, Average CPU Ready and CPU Wait data.
- Memory Performance: includes Active Memory, Balloon Memory, Shared Memory and Swapped Memory data.
Also there is an expanded set of reports. The combination gives better and quicker insights into the VMWare environment in order to troubleshoot issues and to proactively find upcoming issues.
Now as some of you probably know I have always been a big fan of a competing vendors management pack for VMWare (Veeam) and I still am. However it is good that a few other vendors have been looking seriously at creating a good management pack which can cover this monitoring scenario. I know a few have been working on this and are becoming serious contenders when it comes to product selection for this purpose. The Bridgeways pack will be one of them now in every selection process. Especially when there is a price difference to be found between solutions our customers (and you) will be looking at price/quality points and if it covers that what you are initially looking for. I know all my customers always look at price very closely and I do not think its a pure Dutch thing to do that.
I will be examining functionality and pro’s and con’s of these packs closely in the future.
So for now congratulations to Bridgeways for taking the step forward and we are watching you closely B)
For any questions regarding this article or any management packs feel free to contact me.
Bob Cornelissen