Simplifying the monitoring of Proxmox virtualized infrastructure

The rise of Proxmox VE in virtualized infrastructures

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has profoundly transformed the virtualization landscape. In just a few months, the sales reorganization, the overhaul of product offerings and the significant increase in licensing costs have prompted many companies to reconsider their reliance on the VMware ecosystem. In this context, Proxmox VE has emerged as a credible, modern and, above all, stable alternative.

Its growing popularity is creating an increasing need for advanced monitoring capable of covering the entire technical stack. Monitoring a Proxmox VE cluster quickly becomes critical as soon as the virtualized infrastructure supports business services, mission-critical applications or production environments. Given these challenges, ServicePilot provides a unified, automated and highly visual approach to monitoring the entire Proxmox stack: Hypervisors, VMs, storage, networking and associated services.

Technical reasons for this adoption

Proxmox Virtual Environment ability to combine virtual machines and containers within a unified interface, along with its native integration of modern technologies, has helped make it the platform of choice for many organizations. Proxmox VE continues to integrate features that appeal to small and large infrastructure users like its centralized cluster architecture, high-availability management, live migration mechanisms and transparent business model.

Companies particularly value technical capabilities that make Proxmox VE not only high-performing but also reliable in mission-critical deployments:

• Modern architecture based on KVM/QEMU and LXC, allowing VMs and containers to be combined within the same cluster.
• Native clustering management with Corosync, enabling high availability.
• Integration of Ceph for distributed storage and Proxmox Backup Server for backup without additional software costs.
• Comprehensive REST API, facilitating automation and integration into DevOps pipelines.
• Dynamic ecosystem, with an active community and frequent updates.
• Transparent pricing model, with no per-CPU, per-socket or per-VM licensing.

Proxmox in modern deployments

Today, Proxmox is used in:

• Multi-node production clusters.
• Private cloud environments.
• Virtualization platforms for MSPs.
• Hybrid infrastructures with Ceph storage.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has adopted Proxmox VE to modernize part of its virtualized environments, deploying dozens of Proxmox VE nodes, high-performance Ceph storage and Proxmox Backup Servers.

Ikoula (a French hosting and cloud provider) and Contabo (a German hosting and cloud provider) use Proxmox VE to offer flexible and high-performance VPS virtualization solutions to its customers.

EdgeUno provides connectivity, cloud and edge services in Latin America and certain regions of EMEA. Thanks to Proxmox VE, EdgeUno has achieved optimal scalability and reliability across its 25 sites worldwide, spanning more than 2,000 VPS instances.

Proxmox VE monitoring: A unified approach with ServicePilot

ServicePilot simplifies the monitoring of Proxmox VE environments with minimal setup: Simply adding a ServicePilot agent to the target servers is all it takes to start collecting essential metrics. Once the Proxmox VE ServicePilot resource is added, the platform automatically sets up dashboards and metrics needed to monitor the status of the cluster and the workloads it hosts.

Monitoring focuses on four fundamental pillars of Proxmox VE: Hosts, virtual machines, containers and storage.

ServicePilot collects data on the status of hosted virtual machines, their availability and their resource consumption. This visibility makes it easy to quickly determine whether a VM is consuming more resources than expected, experiencing performance issues or requires special attention due to its operational status.

LXC containers benefit from the same level of monitoring. ServicePilot reports on their status, workload and resource usage, providing a consistent view of all workloads, whether virtualized or containerized. This unified approach is particularly useful in environments where both technologies coexist.

Storage, which is often at the heart of performance issues in virtualized infrastructures, is also subject to monitoring. ServicePilot analyzes file system usage, enabling the identification of saturated volumes, abnormal behavior or risks of running out of space. This visibility is essential for anticipating incidents and ensuring service continuity.

Correlation that goes beyond Proxmox VE metrics

Proxmox Backup Server plays a central role in protecting Proxmox VE virtualized environments. Its ability to perform deduplicated, incremental and encrypted backups makes it a critical component of service continuity. ServicePilot provides comprehensive monitoring of PBS by tracking the server’s status and the availability of the backup service. By integrating PBS into the overall infrastructure monitoring, ServicePilot provides a consistent view of the data lifecycle, from the production VM through to its backup, thereby ensuring complete observability and enhanced resilience of the Proxmox environment.

ServicePilot also allows you to monitor the security and integrity of the cluster through:

• Service statuses as well as support services like CephFS and synchronization services.
• Intra- and inter-node network traffic in clusters.
• Connection attempts or configuration changes.
• System logs and other logs to detect anomalies.

Beyond data collection, ServicePilot adds an extra layer of insight by correlating Proxmox VE metrics with other infrastructure components. By integrating monitoring of servers, applications, the network and business services, the platform provides a holistic view that enables the rapid identification of the root cause of a problem.

A performance degradation in an application can thus be linked to a virtual machine overload, which in turn is caused by storage saturation. This ability to connect events is one of ServicePilot’s major strengths, transforming monitoring into a true observability tool.

All-in-One monitoring for Proxmox clusters

ServicePilot provides comprehensive monitoring, with a level of technical depth suited to mission-critical Proxmox environments:

• Hypervisors
• VMs
• Containers
• Distributed storage
• Networking
• Internal services
• Logs
• Security

Thanks to its quick installation, minimal configuration and pre-integrated dashboards, ServicePilot enables IT teams to monitor Proxmox VE without added complexity. The platform helps troubleshoot issues faster, anticipate incidents and maintain optimal performance for hosted applications. ServicePilot offers a comprehensive and consistent view of the IT environment, which is essential for ensuring service quality in Proxmox virtualized environments.