Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key VMware vSphere metrics you can monitor to help ensure the health and performance of your virtual environment. In this post, we’ll cover how you can access these key vSphere metrics using a few of VMware’s internal monitoring tools. We’ll also show you how and where to access VMware events and logs to help you gain further insight into your virtual environment.

In Part 2 of this series, we looked at how to use vSphere’s built-in monitoring tools to get insight into core components of your vSphere environment, including virtual machines and their underlying hardware. Next, we’ll show you how to use Datadog to get complete end-to-end visibility into the physical and virtual layers of your vSphere environment.

VMware’s vSphere is a virtualization platform that allows users to provision and manage one or more virtual machines (VMs) on individual physical servers using the underlying resources. With vSphere, organizations can optimize costs, centrally manage their infrastructure, and set up fault-tolerant virtual environments.

Before we dive into the specifics of MetricFire vs. Datadog, let's address the most critical point: scaling. Datadog is great for users who need to do a little bit of everything, but Datadog's biggest weakness is scaling. Datadog can do logs, APM, time-series and more, but scaling time-series metrics, alerts, and servers will cause your monthly bill to escalate. The graph below shows what you pay at Datadog vs. MetricFire: Now, let's dive into MetricFire vs. Datadog, and their key comparisons.