Expanding Application Awareness: What’s new in Comtrade SCOM Management Pack for Nutanix 1.1?

The availability of services provided by applications is crucial for any businesses and the same goes for applications that run on virtual machines inside Nutanix enterprise clouds and provide services to internal or external users.
The main workloads running on Nutanix clusters are Citrix and Microsoft applications and that is something that has to be considered when building a monitoring solution. This is exactly what we had in mind when releasing Comtrade’s SCOM MP for Nutanix 1.0 in May. With version 1.0 we introduced a missing monitoring piece for end-to-end visibility in SCOM, which means connecting the application and infrastructure layer by

Introducing the Application Awareness functionality that identifies Citrix XenApp/Xen Desktop workloads running on Nutanix.

With version 1.1 we continue this vision by expanding the application awareness to detect Microsoft workloads running on Nutanix clusters to the following main areas:

Automatic identification of Microsoft SQL workloads running on Nutanix enterprise clouds

Comtrade’s Nutanix MP 1.1 is able to automatically identify virtual machines that:

• run standalone Microsoft SQL server
• are a part of Microsoft SQL Server Availability Groups (AlwaysOn)
• are a part of Microsoft SQL Server Failover Clusters

Identified virtual machines are logically grouped together in the “Overview Applications” dashboard, along with their roles in the Microsoft SQL environments (like Primary or Secondary replica, Passive or Active node, etc.). “Overview Applications” dashboard lists all Microsoft SQL Workloads and IT admin can now immediately identify resource bottlenecks in Microsoft SQL environments that affect or will affect the performance of the SQL database access, availability, etc. By looking at top VMs sorted by CPU, Memory, IOPS and Latency usage, IT admin can also quickly identify whether some VM, hosting Microsoft SQL, lacks resources and can notify the Nutanix admin to add more resources to it to prevent database access performance disruptions, or he might assign more resources himself with a single click (“Open Nutanix Prism VM Table” in the task pane), which redirects him directly to Nutanix Prism VM management interface.

Automatic detection of Microsoft Exchange workloads running on Nutanix enterprise clouds

Comtrade’s Nutanix MP 1.1 is able to automatically identify virtual machines that:

• run standalone Microsoft Exchange Servers
• are part of Microsoft Exchange Database Availability Groups (DAG)

Identified Microsoft Exchange workloads and the virtual machines hosting them are listed in “Overview Applications” dashboard, where related virtual machines are grouped together along with their roles in Microsoft Exchange environments (CAS server, Mailbox server, etc.). As for Microsoft SQL environments, also for Microsoft Exchange environments IT admin can quickly identify resource bottlenecks that affect the QoS of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes by looking at the top virtual machines hosting Microsoft Exchange servers, sorted by top CPU and Memory usage, IOPS and Latency. This way, he can quickly identify a virtual machine that lacks some resources, like CPU or memory and can cause a bottleneck. Furthermore, the IT admin can also identify the importance of specific machine in the Microsoft Exchange environment by looking at its role. One situation he can prevent is the high latency for end users when logging into Exchange mailbox due to high CPU usage by Exchange CAS server (lacks CPU resources), since IT admin is able to identify high CPU usage of CAS VM(s) immediately by looking at the Top Exchange VMs by CPU usage.

Overview Applications Dashboard showing Citrix XenApp/Xen Desktop, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL applications running on Nutanix enterprise clouds

Last but not the least, having easy and automatized installation and configuration process to simplify IT administrators’ work, save their time and prevent manual errors is very important in today’s complex IT world. And this is what we acknowledged in Comtrade’s Nutanix MP 1.1 by introducing intuitive configuration wizard, which significantly reduces configuration time.

Try extended application awareness for Citrix and Microsoft workloads first hand with 45-day free trial for complete end-to-end monitoring of your Nutanix environment.