Xen Developer Summit 2015

Xen possesses uniquely powerful capabilities for monitoring virtual machine behavior. Collectively known as virtual machine introspection (VMI), these capabilities are often described from a security perspective, yet they are incredibly useful far beyond that sphere. VMI enables observation of both OS and software from an external vantage point, even when a VM has crashed, when a customer has locked himself out of the OS, when a guest is so minimalistic that it lacks management tools, and when a VM is inaccessible via network. We will explore how VMI complements traditional systems monitoring tools and aids issues encountered in daily IT operations. A variety of perspectives will be considered from unikernels to automotive/embedded, from performance metrics to audit/compliance, from debugging to security. Finally, we will review dev tools and libraries for using these fantastic features.