Introduction

It goes without saying that monitoring and backing up of production KVM instances is important in order to meet uptime Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) and to satisfy high-availability and performance requirements. Monitoring and backing up of virtual machines is not very different from monitoring and backing up of physical servers. In some cases, it's even more convenient to back up a single image file for VM or create a snapshot, rather than the filesystem of an OS running on a physical server.

In this chapter, we are going to see examples on how to gather resource usage metrics for live KVM instances and how to monitor the resource usage and alert on predefined thresholds with tools such as Sensu. Following this, we are going to focus on different ways of backing up KVM guests using tools such as rsync, and creating and managing snapshots with the help of the virsh command.