Understanding and managing the unique operational challenges of the vCloud is key to success for any vCloud provider. VMware vCenter Operations Manager and VMware vFabric™ Hyperic® can be used proactively to monitor both the service provider cloud resources and management environment. The vCloud resources are the VMware clusters that provide the compute, storage, and network resources to the customers or consumers. The management environment handles the vCloud management components.

Using vCenter Operations Manager, the service provider can monitor the resource cluster for overall health and capacity. Health information includes metrics for CPU, memory, disk and network workloads, events, and anomalies. Capacity reflects the resources and capacity available for future client deployments.

Using Hyperic, the service provider can monitor the management components down to the application level. This includes SQL, vCenter, and vCloud Director database and operating system-specific metrics.