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NiCE VMware Management Pack
for Microsoft SCOM

Advanced VMware monitoring for better control, user experience, and business outcomes.

VMware Monitoring Made Easy

Virtualization with VMware not only makes the operation of your IT more efficient and flexible, but also more cost-effective. But how do you ensure that your virtual environments always run efficiently and are available?
The NiCE VMware Management Pack is a comprehensive and intuitive System Center extension for managing your VMware vSphere environments: monitor performance and availability, gain transparency beyond the virtualization layer, and unleash the full potential of your virtual environments.

Benefits

More performance, more availability, more transparency: Discover the most important advantages extended VMware monitoring offers with the NiCE VMware Management Pack for Microsoft SCOM.

Identify problems faster
Seamless SCOM Integration
Use native SCOM functions
Optimize VMware environments

Identify problems faster
Integrated functions such as SCOM “Diagnostic Tasks” enable efficient troubleshooting. By identifying and resolving problems faster, you increase productivity and avoid costly downtime.

Seamless SCOM integration
Simply solve problems yourself: Thanks to the sophisticated integration into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, there is no need to install or configure additional server proxies or connectors.

Use native SCOM functions
The NiCE VMware Management Pack builds on the Microsoft System Center architecture and follows the best practice of using VMware’s REST-based API for monitoring. This means that no additional agents are required on the VMware vSphere systems.

Optimizing your VMware environments has never been easy: Use the many options and the comprehensive overview that VMware Monitoring offers you over resources such as CPU, memory, storage, clusters or the network. It also includes vSAN and complete vCenter monitoring.

End-to-End VMware Monitoring

The NiCE VMware Management Pack for Microsoft SCOM offers you all key functions for easy and efficient end-to-end VMware monitoring from a single source.

  • Clear and precise performance indicators
  • Single pane of glass view of your systems
  • Timely alerts
  • Pinpoint problem identification
  • In-depth reporting
  • Alert correlation

Monitoring Features

Thanks to the numerous integrated monitoring functions, Microsoft SCOM administrators can rely on continuous real-time monitoring and thus maximum performance and availability of their VMware vSphere environments.
With the NiCE VMware Management Pack, you look beyond the virtualization layer: It shows you how the virtualization configuration affects all application services and the user experience.

Monitoring VMware
vCenter Server
Datacenter
Datastore
Datastore Provisioning
Hosts
VMs
Clusters
VMware vSAN
vCenter Service
VMware Certificate Status
Rules and Views
Tasks
Snapshot Management
Reports

VMware Monitoring
Would you like to run your VMware environment as efficiently and stably as possible? Then you need to know which host server or hardware a virtual environment is running on. You should also monitor specific performance metrics such as CPU, memory, storage, network, and disk usage to identify problems early.
Use the extended VMware monitoring and keep an eye on all components and resources at all times. You benefit from the increased performance and availability of your VMware vSphere environments, which the NiCE Management Pack enables with numerous functions.
Full-stack auto-discovery, 180+ out-of-the-box monitors for critical components, views and rules, predefined tasks for simplified administration, numerous reporting options and more.

vCenter Server Monitoring
The vCenter Server is not a physical server, but an application for the central administration of a vSphere infrastructure. A vCenter consists of a vSphere Client and Web Client, a vCenter Server database, a vCenter Single Sign-On, and the managed ESXi hosts together with the hosted virtual machines.
The vCenter Server runs under Windows or as a vCenter Server Appliance (a preconfigured Linux derivative). The virtualization structure operated on it not only eliminates downtimes such as the maintenance of physical storage and servers, but also enables up to 80% higher hardware utilization.
To keep the vCenter Server running optimally, you should continuously monitor resources such as CPU, memory, storage, and the status of the vCenter Service Health. This not only enables a direct insight into the current performance, but also reliable forecasts thanks to the collected data. For this purpose, the data can be enriched by further correlations.

Data center monitoring
A data center is a complex entity consisting of hardware, network components for internal and external connections, storage, comprehensive security management and, last but not least, a managed power supply. The virtualization of data centers reflects this complexity in software-based, centrally managed containers. This reduces operating costs while increasing scalability and overall performance by up to 80%.
For this purpose, standard VMware data centers use so-called ESXi hosts as physical servers on which the virtualizing hypervisor runs. There is also a management server running the vCenter Server application, a management client for data center management and access to virtual machines, storage networks and arrays, and various IP networks.
Monitoring VMware vSphere data centers and their components is extremely important for maximum performance and availability. Use the NiCE VMware Management Pack to comprehensively monitor the configuration and overall status as well as the number of total VMs, min/max active VMs, as well as powered off and suspended VMs.

Data store monitoring
VMware vSphere Datastores are virtual storage containers for files located on a local server hard drive or in the network on a SAN (Storage Area Network). They hide the peculiarities of each storage device and offer a unified model for storing virtual machine files.
Use the NiCE VMware Management Pack to monitor not only the connection status, but also the provided, used and free space as well as read and write latencies. You also benefit from warning messages that are automatically triggered in the event of problems.

Data store provisioning
Thin provisioning is a cost-saving method of providing storage capacity in virtualized storage environments. However, when a datastore runs out of space, thin-provisioned virtual disks can no longer dynamically grow to meet the additional storage needs.
If  this condition occurs, virtual machines with additional storage requirements are stopped immediately to prevent a failure of the guest operating systems. The NiCE VMware MP monitors and collection rules support you in organizing and monitoring your datastore overprovisioning.

Host monitoring
VMware ESXi are software-based hypervisors that help create virtual machines on one or more physical host systems. They abstract memory, storage, and processing power for the virtual machines. ESXi hosts, on the other hand, are the server or data storage devices on which the hypervisor is installed.
The NiCE VMware Management Pack enables comprehensive monitoring of your ESXi hosts: you get all information about the configuration, CPU, disconnect, maintenance, stopped or unresponsive hosts. In addition, connected sensor groups such as fans, memory, power, software, storage, processor, temperature, and voltage metrics paint a complete picture of the health of your VMware hosts.

VM monitoring
Virtual machines (VMs) are used to emulate different operating systems on a single physical computer to save storage space, time, and management costs. In this way, the physical infrastructure is replaced by software to provide a virtual environment for any type of application. With all the benefits, however, instabilities can also occur if too many VMs are running on a physical computer.
By comprehensively monitoring the key components and detecting problems in time, you get the maximum performance from your VMs. NiCE VMware Management Pack gives you all the power to do that: monitor memory usage, uptime, tools, network and CPU usage, including swaps, overall health, and status, high balloon drivers, guest disks, dropped packets, distributed resource scheduler (DRS) recommendation ratings, and more.

Cluster monitoring
When you need more VMs and they don’t fit on a single physical server, VMware clusters come into play. They consolidate multiple physical servers with their combined resources. Each is running a VM, that is used for High Availability (HA) and load balancing of the cluster.
With the NiCE VMware Management Pack, you ensure that your VMware clusters achieve peak performance: Use the comprehensive functions to monitor CPU utilization, ready time, MHz, min/max active VMs, memory usage and utilization, overall status, noisy neighbors, shut down and suspended VMs, storage HA, and storage failover.

VMware vSAN
VMware vSAN is software-defined storage used in conjunction with the VMware ESXi hypervisor. Regardless of the base hardware, vSAN provisions and manages storage space based on defined policies. This storage is primarily used for high-performance and mission-critical applications as well as for VDI and back-office systems.
To ensure configuration, patching, upgrades, and security for vSAN, the VMware tool Skyline Health uncovers potential environmental problems and solutions. You can use the NiCE VMWare Management Pack to delve even deeper into the underlying data and microservices flow of vSAN and Skyline Health: it offers a new, comprehensive set of monitors for optimal performance and utilization accounting of your vSAN deployments.

vCenter Service
With vCenter Service, you use a centralized platform for managing, operating, resource provisioning, and performance evaluation of virtual machines and hosts.
To keep you relaxed, the NiCE VMware Management Pack checks the current status and availability of the services. And above all on what undesired failures and thus the DRS and HA management are concerned.

VMware Certificate Status
If the certificate of your vCenter machine expires, communication and many services usually fail. Be prepared and use the NiCE certificate status monitor to keep an eye on the validity of your certificates and avoid failures.

Rules and Views
Discover anomalies and trends faster with the advanced monitoring capabilities of the NiCE VMware Management Pack: use fully customizable, out-of-the-box rules and views to collect, manage and graphically display all data from your VMware environment.

Tasks
Predefined tasks allow you to run basic and advanced processes with just one mouse click, saving you a lot of “dead” administration time. You can easily automate tasks such as “Check VMware Tools Status”, “Check HA Network Configuration”, or “Power Off VM” to simplify daily management.
With NiCE VMware Management Pack for SCOM you get 30 predefined tasks for managing clusters, data centers, hosts, host log files, VMware servers, and VMs.

Snapshot Management
With the Snapshot Manager, you create a disk copy of a VM to be able to restore it at a later point in time, which is especially useful after a failure or system error.
However, because snapshot changes are written to a separate delta file, snapshot disks can quickly double in size, affecting the performance of your VMs. Avoid such problems and administrative cleanup efforts by monitoring your vSphere environment through advanced NiCE snapshot management tasks.

Reports
In order to use synergies in the team and to increase performance and productivity, effective communication is required. And only with complete, accurate, and objective information can you create accurate future forecasts, IT infrastructure plans, and reliable budget planning.
The NiCE VMware Management Pack for SCOM makes decision-making easier. It offers you more than 20 predefined reports ranging from infrastructure summaries, memory, and CPU over and underutilization, host capacity and performance, clusters, datastores, VMs, tasks, and events.

FAQ

Get answers to the most frequent questions regarding the NiCE VMware Management Pack for SCOM

What SCOM versions are supported?
What VMware versions are supported?
How is the licensing done?
Are there other requirements?
What are users saying?

The NiCE VMware Management Pack supports Microsoft SCOM 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022.

VMware vCenter Server 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0
VMware ESXi 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0

The NiCE VMware Management Pack is licensed per one (1) physical CPU socket on a vSphere/ESX production server.

The NiCE VMware Management Pack does not have any other requirements.

“We are currently using another Management Pack but will be moving to the NiCE option as soon as we can. Already have NiCE’s Oracle and Office 365 MP’s and in terms of support and functionality, they’re excellent. I saw a demo of their VMware MP at a conference recently and it was enough to convince me.
Big thumbs up for NiCE!”

Adam K., VP, Customer Success

Customer References

NiCE VMware Customer Reference on Multinational Chemicals Company

Multinational Chemical Company

Advanced, real end-to-end VMware monitoring

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US Federal Energy Agency picks NiCE VMware Management Pack

US Federal Energy Agency

VMware Performance insights far beyond their expectations

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NiCE VMware Management Pack Success Story

US Local Government

Full control through advanced VMware monitoring

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Start advanced VMware monitoring now

Please send us your request via the web form. We are looking forward to receiving your request.

Kind regards and keep on rocking,
Your NiCE IT Management Solutions Team

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