Why use HP SIM over Veeam Monitor?

[AlexanderDonov]

We're an HP shop and have HP SIM installed for monitoring our servers. I was wondering what would be the advantage of using Veeam monitor for our VI over HP SIM with VMware MIBs?

TIA

Alex

[Gostev]

Hello Alex, I've never seen this product before... I will ask around if someone else can tell me anything about its features.
Does it support ESXi and shows all the performance metrics we do? Have you tried our product?

[AlexanderDonov]

Its official name is Systems Insight Manager. It's known as SIM around here. It uses SNMP traps and someone suggested using it with VMware MIBS to monitor and send alerts for our VI environment.

No, I haven't used your monitor yet, but does it support only ESXi or regular ESX also? We don't have any ESXi.
Also what is the advantage of using your product over built-in ESX VC?

[Gostev]

We support all versions of ESX. I just heard from someone that HP solutions are not using VMware API to get the performance data and instead rely on console agents and SNMP. Which means limited/no ESXi support, and lack of performance data shown.

As for built-in ESX VC, have you actually tried to use it for monitoring? Basically, it is just not a monitoring application, I was having hard time using it on my test lab hosts with just a few VMs because of no consolidated views, no summary dashboard, no ability to add standalone hosts into the picture etc. There's too much stuff to list here, I guess it is hard to explain until you actually try to monitor/troubleshoot your environment using VC.

As for other major features - if you'd like, you can review Veeam Monitor datasheet. As you will note, most of them are simply not provided by VC. http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-server/ ... tor_vi.pdf

I suggest that you give Veeam Monitor a try yourself - unlike some other monitoring frameworks it takes minutes to install and get going. Or, you can request a live demo with our Systems Engineer here: http://www.veeam.com/register_for_a_live_demo.asp

Hope this helps!

[swakeham]

We are Also an HP Shop, and we use SIM but it really isn't in the same category as Veeam Monitor for this stuff, they aren't direct competitors for anything.
Maybe if you buy all the plugins like performance management, virtual machine manager and so on you might get close, but so far I am getting better information from Veeam Monitor.

We have tried many SIM plugins, but we always go back to just letting it look at hardware.