Zenoss announced a free tool for monitoring performance of VMware ESX/ESXi servers. This Zenpack runs VMware resxtop command, providing alerts and a summative metrics in a single graphical view.  It’s designed to streamline the management of your VMware vCloud, giving automated processes to the standards of monitoring it constantly needs.

“As we have been working with organizations to provide deep VMware monitoring capabilities, we saw some of our customers and community members using the esxtop command. Unfortunately, this tool was somewhat hidden and only available for power users. We are combining the strength and ease of use of Zenoss with the esxtop command to provide a simpler monitoring capability for VMware ESX environments,” said Simon Jakesch, Engineer at Zenoss.

“With this free ZenPack, users can easily identify performance problems in their ESX and ESXi environment, and immediately take steps to resolve the issues before they affect the business. This capability will save administrator time and increase accessibility to a very powerful performance tool.”

While virtualization administrators are delighted with the esxtop command, they still long for a simplified and enhanced performance in troubleshooting. esxtop have no reporting and alerting capabilities, and cannot be executed through a command line interface. This is where the new Zenpack for esxtop comes in.

Some key features:

* Performance metrics from ESX and ESXi servers are automatically captured, graphed, displayed, and continually updated in one graphical interface.
* Users can set thresholds and exception alerting based on performance metrics and events as they occur.
* Historical data is saved for in-depth root cause analysis.

The Zenpack for esxtop is free, and that’s in order to attract new customers to the Zenoss product line.  It’s the latest in a series of plug-ins that aid in monitoring and automating much of your server management.  With the changes the virtualization journey is setting up industry-wide, automation and managment, with secure transfer and minimal friction, are key areas for enterprise users right now.

In creating more plug-ins for VMware products, Zenoss is also looking to build its community for open source projects around this market.  We’re seeing a number of open cloud initiatives taking flight, further validated by the funding of Cloudera earlier this week.