IBM Cloud Monitoring is introducing a new Advisor component focusing on VSI for VPC hosts. In a similar way to the Kubernetes Advisor, the VSI for VPC Advisor helps not only monitor the status of your instances across all your infrastructure, but also identify potential issues (like CPU throttling or out-of-memory errors) and get guidance on troubleshooting and resolution.
Why Host monitoring is a challenge
Monitoring hosts is a daily challenge for many teams, including SRE, DevOps, Platform, and Infrastructure. When an alert notification is received, it indicates which host resource is at risk and the extent of that risk. That is the right starting point, but then your monitoring solution should guide you through the ongoing incident so you can solve it, and even improve the alert rule, so the next time the alert triggers, you have either more time, or more information. Or both.
Even when the pager goes off and you’ve got initial alert info, getting deep visibility into what the host’s actually doing isn’t easy. Traditional monitoring is great for high‑level graphs, but the real win is understanding why a resource is at risk—not just that CPU is high. Teams need process‑level visibility to see exactly which processes are spiking CPU or memory or causing I/O bottlenecks. That’s what makes troubleshooting effective and helps you resolve incidents faster.
How the new VSI for VPC advisor can help your team
Managing Virtual Server Instances (VSIs) often involves navigating multiple tools and interfaces, even with existing monitoring solutions, making it challenging to maintain a comprehensive overview. This advisor offers a single pane of glass, simplifying visibility across your entire infrastructure down to specific VSI instances, accelerating problem identification, and ensuring operational health.
This integrated approach facilitates rapid diagnosis and resolution of common server issues. Beyond typical monitoring insights (CPU, memory, disk, network, and so on), this tool "advises" you about common problems that your hosts might have such as elevated CPU or memory utilization. When these issues arise, immediate insights are crucial. The system delivers critical details, including:
Resource usage: From a troubleshooting point of view, it shows when issues occur, how often, and for how long—so teams see not just a CPU or memory spike, but its timing and frequency.
Advisories: Information on common issues that affect VMs—like CPU throttling, out‑of‑memory errors, or host‑not‑present events.
Detailed resource usage by process: You can correlate the resource usage with the processes involved, to identify the root cause at a process level.
Alert suggestions: Suggests alert rules that teams can enable with one click, so teams are notified the next time the issue occurs.
Proactive monitoring keeps your VSI hosts healthy and your users unaffected. This solution allows for easy configuration of alerts for these common problems. Instant notifications are triggered the moment a critical event occurs—like a sudden spike in CPU or memory. These alerts ensure continuous awareness of potential issues, enabling remediation before services or users are impacted.
Get started using VSI for VPC Advisor
VSI for VPC Advisor is already available in your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance. You can check it under the Advisor menu. If you want to fully leverage it, you would need to install the IBM Cloud Monitoring agent. You can do it by following this guide in the docs.
Then you can go to your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance and start using this new Advisor.
Learn more about IBM Cloud Monitoring
In this article, you learned how IBM Cloud Monitoring helps troubleshooting your host infrastructure and applications with the VSI for VPC Advisor tool. Click this link to start using IBM Cloud Monitoring today!