Monitoring & Virtualisation glossary
This monitoring and virtualisation glossary defines, in one sentence, the key terms from our courses: monitoring, hypervisor, VM, backup… Each definition stands on its own and, where relevant, points to the related course.
Monitoring
Monitoring continuously watches the health of servers, networks and services and raises alerts on anomalies. See Centreon (a Zabbix course is also available in French).
Metric
A metric is a value measured over time (CPU, memory, disk, availability) that monitoring collects and tracks.
Threshold & alert
A threshold triggers an alert when a metric crosses it, warning you before an incident.
SNMP
SNMP is a standard protocol used to collect the status and metrics of network devices and servers.
Dashboard
A dashboard gathers the key monitoring indicators for a real-time overview.
Virtualisation
Virtualisation runs several virtual machines on a single physical server. See Hyper-V and vSphere 8.
Hypervisor
A hypervisor (VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, Proxmox) creates and manages virtual machines on a host server.
Virtual machine (VM)
A VM is a software-emulated computer with its own OS, isolated from the other VMs on the same host.
VMware vSphere / ESXi
vSphere is VMware’s virtualisation platform, built on the ESXi hypervisor. See the vSphere 8 course.
Hyper-V
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hypervisor, built into Windows Server. See the Hyper-V course.
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE is an open-source virtualisation platform (KVM and containers). See the Proxmox VE course.
Snapshot
A snapshot captures a VM’s state at a point in time, so you can roll back if something goes wrong.
Cluster
A cluster groups several hosts to spread the load and keep services running if a server fails.
High availability (HA)
High availability keeps services reachable despite failures, through redundancy and automatic failover.
Backup
Backup copies data and VMs so they can be restored after an incident; Veeam is a leading solution. See Veeam v13.
Replication
Replication keeps an up-to-date copy of VMs on another site to recover quickly after a disaster.
Disaster recovery plan (DRP)
A DRP organises restarting the information system after a major disaster.
The key monitoring and virtualisation terms, explained simply
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