CPU Performance Monitoring

NetCrunch monitors CPU resource availability and performance for all your IT Infrastructure, including physical and virtual servers, switches and routers. Receive warnings and alerts in advance of poor device performance. All critical IT infrastructure devices contain a central processing unit (CPU) that ultimately dictates the performance and performance capacity of the device. Device virtualization adds an additional layer of complexity and is present in both server and switching technologies today. While overall device performance is often influenced by additional device resources, such as memory and disk (databases), CPU utilization for network switches and physical servers is typically the primary metric that indicates current system performance levels as well as available capacity.

Central Processing Unit (CPU):

The Central Processing Unit is responsible for the majority of a devices logic processing and is a primary component in the allocation of computing capacity. Evidence of how important the CPU is can be seen in the evolution of multi-core CPU's which look to pack multiple processors into the foot-print of a single CPU (socket). If your servers use Intel server chips with hyperthreading (most do), each core behaves like 2 CPU cores, creating the concept of logical processors which is the number of actual CPU cores x2. Network devices leverage multi-core processors but are typically immune from the added cost associated with a device's usage. An exception example is the Juniper's EX line that supports virtual routers. Device virtualization capitalizes on the surplus of computing power in a given device and is seen as the ideal method for minimizing a data center's physical device, power, and cooling footprint.

CPU and Software Licensing Costs

Keeping pace with the evolution of multi-socket, multi-core processors in servers is software licensing. VMware, Oracle, and Microsoft require accurate CPU core counts as the measure of purchased compute capacity when choosing product versions and properly licensing hypervisors, database servers, and operating systems.

When you consider that virtualization allows you to over-provision, or allocate more virtual processors than physical cores, the importance of managing your CPU resources becomes critical, and it directly impacts not only performance but also the licensing costs. VMware refers to this concept as a resource overcommitment and offers techniques for proper over-allocation of vCPU's. Underprovision your CPU resources and you run the risk of poor performance, whereas overprovisioning allocates unnecessary compute capacity while incurring higher software costs.

This balancing act of computing capacity, provisioning, and associated software costs have elevated CPU performance monitoring in modern IT systems into an abstract equation putting performance against cost management. NetCrunch gives visibility to the CPU monitoring metrics for all your devices and virtual environments, giving you control over how your resources are deployed as well as how they are performing.

Performance Monitoring

NetCrunch provides agentless monitoring of a device's CPU resources across the broad spectrum of Manufacturers, monitoring protocols and metrics. Newly discovered nodes are automatically identified, and best-practice CPU monitoring metrics with alerting thresholds are automatically applied by policy.

NetCrunch provides comprehensive CPU monitoring via the device Status page:

• Summary of device's operating system view showing CPU. memory, disk, and network utilization
• ESXi host affiliation if virtual: Consumed Host CPU, RAM
• Detailed CPU performance metrics with a summary and drill down chart views.
• Comprehensive, Best Practise based, and policy applied warnings and alerts
• Intelligent, sample-based threshold trigger logic

cpucpu monitoring