Demand Technology Software is a US firm that develops a number of products for performance data collection and monitoring on Windows operating systems.
The company’s flagship product is called Performance Sentry. Its multi-tier architecture is designed to scale up to thousands of monitored servers, storing their performance data on its SQL Server database. To collect data, it uses an agent that runs as a Windows service.
The company just released a version of this product that supports VMware vSphere (both ESX and ESXi hosts, with or without vCenter Server). The new version, called Performance Sentry VM, does more than just run inside a virtual machine.
Leveraging the VMware APIs in fact, Demand Technology Software managed to translate the VMware’s performance metrics into objects and counters that Windows Performance Monitor (Perfmon) can use.
The translated data, coming from the hypervisor and the guest operating systems, is presented by the Performance Sentry virtual machine that basically runs as a proxy provider. At this point any management solution can use it, including Perfmon or System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) thanks to a Management Pack that the company develops.
The product collects over 170 counters from 17 different objects.
The company published a video of the product in action:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PFMZiXOpO4[/youtube]