Few days back, I had the chance to evaluate Hyper9 Virtual Environment Optimization known by Hyper9 VEO. Actually as most of our internal testing equipment is currently out of the office, the guys at Hyper9 was kind enough to provide me with a SandBox on their side to test the product. Below is my feedback based on my experience with their sandbox.

There are two main differences between Hyper9 VEO and other Performance Monitoring solution being searchable & being focused on optimization rather than monitoring. Being searchable can make an amazing different, that you would not imagine how powerful it get without trying it. Before I tried the product, their engineer has shown me that they have a search bar & like no others you can search their product for any bit of info you need. At first glance, that did not get my attention neither I was able to make sense of it. After testing the product first hand, I have discovered that make all the difference. Its similar to comparing traditional web directories & Search Engines. Before search engine came up, web directories were the main method of discovering sites on the web. You used to have to click your way through categories, category by category at a time. It was quite tough when you wanted to search for items with two characteristic as you had to digg the first one & then go the full route for the other one. Search engine has changed the way you look for websites, by allowing you to search by all your keywords at once & get the results in an easier & faster manner

Let’s look at an optimization related scenario. If you wanted to find out all the virtual machines with 4vCPU that utilizes less than 10% of CPU (Basically over allocated virtual machines). In normal performance monitoring software, you will have to look for under utilized VMs with less than 10% CPU. Then you will get a list of all VMs with 4 vCPUs. Then you manually will have to match between the two lists. In Hyper9 VEO with its search capability, you can use a query which will return just that. I have tried to create a video to demonstrate this, which you can find below. Please note this the first full fledge video I create & publish. It is not professionally edited by any mean & the voice might be a bit muscled, but I thought I would still share it with you if it will add a bit of value. I will try to improve my video creation skills in the future.

Another video, but this time this one is made by Hyper9 that show how the search bar can be of a great use to you:

The second main difference of Hyper9 Virtual Environment optimization is as the name say it has been created with optimization of your virtual environment being the focus of the product. Unlike other Performance monitoring tools, Hyper9 strength comes when you are trying to optimize your environment rather that being focused on only monitoring it. I believe its a great tool for consultants that want to offer a health check or optimize their customer environments. As well admins can use it to ensure their environment is configured up to best practice & maintained that way.

Hyper9 has a monitoring capability, but it does not seems to be their highest focus or the niche of focus. If you need though a monitoring tool which combine Virtual Environment Optimization in it then look no further. If all you need is a simple performance monitoring tool or only performance monitoring then you might want to check your alternatives, though keep up Hyper9 VEO as an option as you might need its other features at a later time. Check out the video below to see more about Hyper9 Monitoring & Event reporting capabilities:

Hyper9 offer quite extensive reports. I mean you can generate a report for every parameter you can search the environment for.  You can create a quite custom data reports using the search query as well. Although it was not available in the Sandbox, I saw in one of their videos that they offer some reporting packs that you can install separately to get most often needed reports. The only drawback I found with their reporting, its only Excel sheet with the number chunked in it. So basically you can get all the data you need for the report, but not a full fledge formatted report in PDF format or the similar. I am not sure though if that is a part of their reporting packs. If I am missing on that, please leave me a comment.

Hyper9 can help you big time with planning for your future expansion, as it can give you a great trend analysis of your environment that can provide you a clear expectation of your future growth. You will be able to make an informative decision, when asking for next year upgrade budget. The video below demonstrate just that:

Yeah, I know the rest of the videos has a much better quality than the first one. No I did not pick up video editing that quick as I did not produce the rest of the videos, I believe they were produced by Hyper9 themselves, but I might be wrong.

I hope this post was useful, & hope to hear your feedbacks in the comments area below.