User Story: CDK Global’s vSphere Performance Monitoring Product Selection Process

The Business Challenge

I was tasked with evaluating and testing various products for monitoring our complex IT infrastructure. We needed better visibility into VMware server performance so that we could increasingly anticipate potential performance issues, and if they did occur, we needed to then be able to automate immediate fix actions.

There were a number of key requirements:

1. The solution must cover a wide variety of platform servers because, here at ADP Dealer Services, we use a wide variety of operating systems such as UNIX, UnixWare, AIX, Microsoft and various forms of Linux servers all on VMware platforms.
2. The product must have the same functionality for both physical and virtual environments.
3. Additional requirements were ease of use, flexibility of installation and deployment on the various platforms we maintain, easy management and the flexibility to be able to run self-healing programs and scripts to automatically rectify problems without the need for user intervention.

The Solution

I evaluated many different products at various price ranges. The exhaustive evaluation included, but wasn’t limited to, HP Openview, Solarwinds, Nagios and Kaseya. The decision to choose Goliath Performance Monitor was made for the following reasons:

1. Ease of configuration. Goliath Performance Monitor comes with hundreds of pre-configured watches that makes it very easy to set up and begin monitoring.
2. We also found that Goliath Performance Monitor offered us the ability to run or schedule reports on WMI objects enabling us to not only monitor for faults, but also to detect and tune systems for peak performance and detect where bottleneck or performance issues were occurring automatically. This is especially useful for intermittent faults as these can be brought to our attention without the need to log on to a suspect server and waste time watching for events or problems
3. The capability of managing our VMware servers with either an agent or agentless solution offered great flexibility. It is easy to capture key metrics from the virtual machine, host or hypervisor.
4. Comprehensive reports and interactive alert screens offered real time visibility into the performance of our VMware server farms.
5. The Goliath Performance Monitor’s “intelligent agent” allows one agent at a remote site, behind the firewall, to be designated a “master agent” and receives alerts from all the other agents deployed at that site. The intelligent agent will then send status and alerts back through the firewall to the remote Goliath Performance Monitor server. This made monitoring our remote locations very easy and efficient from a resource and management perspective.

The Results

We are now monitoring over our VMware environment of 1700 servers both in our data centers and on customers’ remote sites. We can automatically log calls on our own bespoke call control system and allocate engineers to rectify problems on servers, sometimes even before the customer is aware that a problem exists. All the statistics from Goliath Performance Monitor are fed directly to our Extranet to allow customers to view in real time the status of their own servers.
Obviously, with the quantity of servers we have, it was crucial that we had access to vendor support should a problem come to light. Support is something Goliath Technologies, takes very seriously! Solutions to queries on the product or features were quickly responded to and rectified, or an enhancement was added in a very professional and timely way.

We wanted a product that was very competitively priced, had great flexibility, a vast host of features and was easy to implement and manage. We found it in Goliath Performance Monitor.