Vsphere Monitoring Products (Reporting) – Veeam MP vs. vCenter Ops Manager

Recently I was asked about why I would use one product over another and what are the differentiators that would make a company choose 1 product over another or indeed both. You can read lots about the feature sets and how useful each product is here and here but my intention for this post is to give you an idea of the reporting capabilities of each product to help you decide. Both products are licensed per socket and have pricing options dependent on what is required so again I urge you to investigate this if this is a key requirement for your organisation. So read on if you’d like an idea of how reporting compares for both products.

Veeam MP for Vmware

This product is very mature and has been in the market for over 4 years. It functions by utilising collectors that harvest information from your vCenter servers. This architecture is agentless and uses standard API calls to ensure that statistics are gathered and stored in the Systems Center DataWarehouse database depending on your retention of data points.

Lets have a look at the reporting. I’ve shown some example report names below.

 

There are lots of useful reports there and some key ones are for Veeam Backup and Replication which are useful if you also run Veeam Backup in your organisation. The capacity and performance reports are very good too and laid out very clearly. I’d say that most of the reports you would want to run in an organisation are available but the key here is that Operations Manager must be used to either run or schedule these reports so you must have someone in your organisation who is familiar with Operations Manager.

 

vCenter Ops Manager

This product has increased in use over the last couple of years although it is newer on the scene than the former product. It also works via an agentless method and harvests its statistics from vCenter presenting the information in an easy to understand dashboard with traffic light colour coding.

So lets have a look at what types or report you could expect to run.

Again, a fully comprehensive set of reports that are very similar to the Veeam reports. The key here is that these ‘out of the box’ reports are also reporting on metrics that vCenter has already collected so you could say that both products are pretty much alike. vCenter Ops Manager also has some excellent analysis reports that can help to determine which hosts, VMs or datastores have the highest/lowest utilisations etc. Again this is something that the Veeam MP can report on.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for the definitive answer here on which one to choose then you won’t find it. As a user of both and someone that has used the reporting in both products I’d say they are very similar in their approaches and I don’t have a particular favourite for one reason or another. I’d say that if you are a Veeam shop and you use the Backup products then you will find that the Veeam MP complements your investment in a single vendor very well.

If you do not have a reporting product and you simply want to leverage your investment in Vmware then it may be preferable to stick with the Vmware suite of products and go down the Ops Manager route.

No matter what path you take, you won’t be disappointed with either product and I’d encourage you to trial each product in order to gauge what sits better with your teams and your organisation before making a decision.