Virtualizing your servers to reduce costs is only the first step. As server virtualization has matured, so has the need for effective management of the virtual environment. You need to be the first to know when issues affect the performance and availability of your virtual environment.We’re going to take a look to see how your company can take advantage of free 24×7 real-time monitoring for VMware and Hyper-V with alerts, reports and up-to-date documentation for your environment.

Core Requirement or Nice to Have?

The argument that monitoring is just a “nice to have”, and not really a core requirement for operational readiness, dissipates quickly when a critical system or application fails without warning. The free edition of Veeam ONE delivers complete visibility into the virtual infrastructures with the capabilities that matter the most. After installation you are given instant access to data for an unlimited number of host and guest systems, including health checks, resource consumptions, and performance issues. This gives administrators the ability to identify risks and take action before problems occur that affect your business.

Every monitoring system comes with alerts to notify technicians when unforeseeable problems occur, but it is rare to also have an extensive knowledgebase at your fingertips to understand what those alert means. Veeam ONE associates every alert to detailed article describing the problem so that you’ll have the proper information to troubleshoot and resolve the issue quickly saving you time and money.

Easy Documentation and Reporting

Keeping documentation up-to-date is the single hardest task for any technology department to tackle, often leaving it incomplete or nonexistent. Many Administrators have neither the time nor proclivity to ensure proper documentation and given the importance of keeping this information current, automation of this process is very advantageous. With Veeam ONE, it’s easy to maintain up-to-date documentation using automatically triggered data collection discovery of your virtual environment.

Administrators are also usually required to provide monthly and weekly reports to upper management. Veeam ONE has a wealth of built-in reports that effectively summarize resources, workload and utilization for a concise picture of your virtual environment. You can be sure reports are on time, every time by automatically generating the reports management demands which can then be delivered to dashboards, email, web portals and folders. Instead of trying to capture and record the status for hundreds or thousands of objects, let Veeam ONE do the work for you.

Capacity Planning and Future Upgrades

Without access to the proper data about resource consumption and performance, it is impossible to accurately determine virtualization provisioning and when to perform future upgrades. Veeam ONE removes the guesswork, allowing you to examining trends and identify over-committed resources. The result leads to well-informed decisions used to manage the growth of your virtual infrastructure. This knowledge can also be used for performance enhancements, allowing your company to prolong an upgrade cycle.

Business View of Virtualization

Virtualization doesn’t have to focus solely on centralization and scalability, nor should it require a large expense to adopt or maintain. Over the past couple of years, virtualization vendors have been trending towards offering many of their products for free. With Veeam ONE, companies can view and manage the virtual environment from a perspective that aligns with your business priorities. Having this insight will keep your company ahead of the technology curve.

Chris Rabe is an IT industry veteran with more than a decade of experience, having consulted for companies such as Coinstar and Microsoft. A very active member in the technology community, he most recently founded Space Rock IT, a managed services provider for SMBs.