A couple of months ago Veeam acquired nworks. Nworks is known for its agentless connectors for managing an VMware ESX (also ESXi !!) environment in SCOM and HP Operations Manager (Openview). Veeam just released version 4.0 of the management connectors.

Nworks is one of the few connectors which integrates with SCOM & HPSOM. Especially in larger organizations where SCOM or HPSOM is the main monitoring tool, integration with the mentioned monitoring tools is more or less mandatory when introducing a new system (in this case VMware).

Using plugin’s like nWorks in one way makes life easy for administrators, they don’t have to write their own management packs and or scripts (in case of MOM), in the other way you have a challenge filtering the right events, because it generates a lot of events. But as they say better too much than too little.

Of course there are more monitoring tools like Veeam’s own Monitor product and of course Vizioncore’s vFoglight (formerly vCharter Pro), but with one monitoring solution in place introducing a second tool for monitoring is a political challenge in most cases, unless there is a very good integration with the company ‘standard’ tool.

The new release 4.0 is a major release, which means that you will have to upgrade all components (for existing users :)).

What’s new in this release:

• Hardware monitoring is now available through VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure SDK
• Changes to performance metrics (changed and new ones)
• Improved VirtualCenter 2.5 API support
• VMware tools version events
• VMware datastores are now displayed in a separate branch of the topology
• The collection interval for the collector is now adjustable (can be increased)
• suppression of events in case of unknown previous state, which is great in larger environments so your monitoring tool will not be ‘spammed’ with events
• A single collector install file is now used for both the Microsoft MP and HP SPI
• The list of ESX hosts managed by the VirtualCenter is updated every collection cycle. In previous versions, the list of hosts in the Configuration UI was only updated when a user clicked “Validate”; now, the list of hosts under a VC server connection is updated as soon as the collector detects a change. The change is actually in the collector service, but the effect is visible in the Configuration UI.
• and more…
  Microsoft SC Operations Manager:
  http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring-ms-operations.html
  HP Software Operations Manager:
  http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring-hp-operations.html