Physical Servers
Q: What specific information does the Cloudamize agent collect?
A: The Cloudamize agent collects system and application related performance and usage metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, network and running applications.
Q: How does the Cloudamize agent connect to the Cloudamize server?
A: The Cloudamize agent sends data to the Cloudamize server over SSL (port 443).
Q: Do I need to open firewall to send data to the Cloudamize server?
A: Yes, the Cloudamize agents send data to the Cloudamize server over SSL (port 443). You need to make sure that outbound SSL (port 443) access is permitted to the Cloudamize server. You will not need to open firewall access if you are using Internet proxy.
Q: What if my physical servers do not have direct access to the Internet?
A: If your physical servers have Internet proxy access, Cloudamize agents will still be able to relay data via your Internet proxy to the Cloudamize server.
Q: Is there a proxy available to forward data from the physical machines that are not directly accessible by Internet?
A: No, there is not a proxy that is available to forward data from the physical machines that are not directly accessible by Internet.
Q: Is the Cloudamize agent a standalone executable (i.e. libc) or does it need Java or another framework preinstalled?
A: For Linux server hosts and VMs, the Cloudamize agent is a standalone binary executable. For Windows servers and VMs, the Cloudamize agent requires .NET framework 2.0 or greater.
Q: What is the performance overhead of running agents on physical servers?
A: The Cloudamize agents are lightweight. Typically it takes less than 0.5% CPU utilization. Cloudamize Agents are Smart Agents. They run two processes. One is the data-collection agent and the other is the watchdog agent. Watchdog agent monitors the data-collection agent and makes sure the data-collection agent is behaving correctly. Watchdog agent monitors every system metric and caps the data-collection agent if it goes beyond expected consumption. If any of the metric is higher than the cap, then data-collection agents sleeps and waits until they can start collecting again. For example, typically, our agents take less than 0.5% CPU utilization. However, if CPU utilization goes higher than 2%, data-collection agents sleeps and waits for watchdog-agent's to tell when to start collection again.
Q: What is the data collection frequency?
A: Cloudamize agents collects data every 30 seconds and pushes it out to Cloudamize server every 5-min.
Q: Can agents be installed on virtual machines without also collecting data from the hypervisor such as vCenter or the Hyper-V host machine?
A: Most performance metrics can be collected from the agent even when the agent is running on a VM and no data is being collected from vCenter. However, there can be some inaccuracy when estimating the CPU utilization. This inaccuracy can lead to an overestimate of the required computational needs, and can result in Cloudamize recommending a larger machine than necessary. However, this is only an issue when the physical server is under provisioned. In any case, memory and IO requirements are estimated correctly. To understand the issue, suppose that two VMs are running on a physical server that has a single CPU with a single one hardware thread. If both VMs are demanding the entire CPU, the hypervisor will allocate 50% of the compute time to each VM. However, from the perspective of a the VM and our agent on the VM, the CPU is 100% utilized. Since the agent sees the CPU 100% utilized, while the CPU is actually only 50% utilized, the Cloudamize agent will over estimate the computational requirements of the VMs. If this scenario occurs frequently, then it could lead to Cloudamize recommended a larger machine than is necessary. On the other hand, if CPU utilization data is collected from the hypervisor, then the actual CPU utilization is measured and an accurate estimate of compute requirements is made.
Q: How much bandwidth is used when the data is transported from Cloudamize agents?
A: Windows/Linux agents are approximately 5KB to 40KB per 10 minutes.
Q. Can I import the data rather than run an agent?
A. No. Cloudamize reads data from vCenter’s read-only APIs. For non-VMWare environment, Cloudamize provides a proprietary agent that can be installed for data collection and can be removed after the data collection period is completed.