VM monitoring using Agent

Monitor the availability, performance, and health of all virtual machines managed by Cloudmon agents. Track CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics in real time across VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, and other hypervisor platforms.

Overview

Virtual machines share underlying physical resources with other VMs on the same host, making resource contention a common and often silent problem. A VM may appear healthy from the outside while quietly competing for CPU cycles or memory with other workloads on the same hypervisor. Cloudmon installs a lightweight agent inside the guest OS of each VM, giving IT teams direct visibility into what is actually happening at the operating system level, independent of what the hypervisor reports.

The agent collects performance data locally and stores it in an offline database for a configurable period of time. When connectivity is restored, all locally stored data is automatically uploaded and processed, ensuring no gaps in your monitoring history.

Navigate to Agents → Virtual Machines to access this view. The summary bar shows Total devices, Down, Critical, Low CPU Usage, Low Memory Usage, and Low Disk Usage counts. Distribution charts break down VMs by State, OS, Vendor, and Virtual Host, giving you a clear picture of how your virtual estate is distributed across hypervisors. The Top 5 charts highlight the VMs under the heaviest CPU, Memory, and Disk load.

Virtual Machine List

The VM list shows all discovered virtual machines with the following details:

Virtual Machine Overview

Selecting a VM opens its detail page. The overview shows key identity and status information, including the hostname, IP address, virtual host, group, customer, state, and status. It also shows availability percentage, total downtime, and current system time.

Hardware details include the processor, memory, partitions, disk, operating system, and BIOS, among other configuration information. Public IP details show the ISP, country, timezone, and organisation, helpful for confirming the hosting environment.

Installed Software

Lists all software installed inside the VM, showing the application name, version, publisher, and installation date. This is particularly useful for VMs running specific application workloads, allowing you to confirm which version of a service or runtime is deployed, identify outdated packages, or audit what is actually installed compared to what should be there.

Processes and Services

Displays real-time CPU and memory usage across all running processes inside the guest OS, alongside a list of monitored system services and their current state. For virtual machines specifically, this view is most useful for:

• Identifying a process inside the guest OS that is consuming more CPU or memory than its vCPU or RAM allocation should allow, pointing to a sizing issue.
• Confirming that the primary application or service the VM is dedicated to is running and not in a failed or crashed state.
• Detecting unexpected processes that should not be running inside a VM provisioned for a specific purpose.
• Correlating a sudden performance drop with a specific process that spiked at the same time helps distinguish between a guest OS issue and a hypervisor-level resource contention problem.

System Metrics

Displays time-series charts for key performance metrics collected from inside the guest OS. For virtual machines, the most relevant metrics include CPU Utilisation, Memory Utilisation, Disk Usage, and Swap Memory, among other performance indicators. Monitoring these from inside the guest provides a different and complementary perspective to hypervisor-level metrics, helping identify cases where the VM reports high resource usage that the hypervisor does not surface.

Troubleshooting