Monitoring Performance of VMs, Hosts, Clusters
Using Commander, you can analyze how a VM, host, or cluster is performing and what issues may be affecting its performance. Performance metrics are retrieved from the cloud provider. By default, Commander gathers performance data from vCenter and SCVMM and can display metrics on the Performance tab for VMs, hosts, and clusters. Additional configuration may be required for public cloud accounts
Commander monitors CPU, memory, disk, and network usage over the last seven days. The average number is calculated by averaging the resource usage over the last seven days. Commander also collects information about the maximum, or peak, resource usage, over the last seven days.
The last seven days of performance information is retrieved when a cloud account is added to Commander. SCVMM is the exception to this rule. For SCVMM, because historical performance data can't be retrieved from the cloud account, Commander waits to obtain seven days' worth of performance data from SCVMM before generating a performance summary.
VM performance metrics are updated automatically by Commander every night. You can also manually update performance information for individual VMs.
GCP prerequisite: To allow Commander to obtain metrics data for GCP VMs, the service account used to add GCP cloud account must have at least the Monitoring Viewer role. To learn more, see Grant permissions to the Commander service account.
Important: Memory usage monitoring requires additional configuration for public cloud instances. See:
- Monitoring Memory Metrics for EC2 Linux Instances
- Monitoring Memory Metrics for EC2 Windows Instances
- Monitoring Memory Metrics for Azure Instances
- Monitoring Memory Metrics for GCP Instances
In this topic:
Viewing weekly VM performance summaries
Use a VM's Performance Summary tab to view a summary of the last seven days of VM performance data. VM performance metrics are updated automatically by Commander every night.
Access through: |
Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications |
Available to: |
View performance metrics: All Access Rights Levels Update performance metrics: All Operator Levels and Higher |
To view a summary of a VM's weekly performance, from the Inventory tree, select a VM, and click the Performance tab.
The VM's performance is displayed in the Weekly Performance Summary page.
Tip: To update the performance summary information for a selected VM, so that it includes the most recent performance data, select Actions > Update Performance.
Performance metrics
Note: Memory usage monitoring requires additional configuration for public cloud instances.
Metric |
Description |
Available for |
---|---|---|
CPU Usage (%) |
Amount of actively used virtual CPU, as a percentage of total available CPU. |
AWS, Azure, GCP, SCVMM, vCenter |
CPU Usage (MHz) |
Amount of actively used virtual CPU. This is the host's view of the CPU usage, not the guest operating system view. |
vCenter |
CPU Ready (%) |
Percentage of time that the VM was ready, but couldn't be scheduled to run on the physical CPU. CPU ready time is dependent on the number of VMs on the host and their CPU loads. |
vCenter |
Memory Usage (%) |
Percentage of allocated memory. Note for SCVMM: Memory performance information is unavailable for VMs configured with static memory, because SCVMM always represents the memory usage as 100%. |
AWS, Azure, GCP, SCVMM, vCenter |
Memory Consumed (MB) |
Amount of physical memory consumed by the VM. Notes:
|
AWS, Azure, GCP, SCVMM, vCenter |
Memory Overhead (MB) |
Amount of machine memory used by the VM kernel to run the VM. |
vCenter |
Memory Ballooning (MB) |
Amount of guest physical memory that's currently reclaimed from the VM through ballooning. This is the amount of guest physical memory that has been allocated and pinned by the balloon driver. |
vCenter |
Disk Usage (MB/s) |
Aggregated disk I/O rate. Notes:
|
AWS, Azure, GCP, SCVMM, vCenter |
Disk Max Latency (ms) |
Highest latency value for any operation executed by the VM. Latency measures the time taken to process a SCSI command issued by the guest OS to the VM. |
vCenter |
Disk Swap In (MB) |
Rate at which memory is swapped from disk into active memory during the interval. |
vCenter |
Disk Swap Out (MB) |
Rate at which memory is swapped from active memory to disk during the interval. This counter is generally more useful than the swap-in counter to determine whether the VM is running slowly due to swapping, especially when looking at real-time statistics. |
vCenter |
Disk IOPS |
Sum of disk read and write IOPS. For Azure, disk metrics are retrieved only for OS disks. This value is a sum of Disk Read Operations/Sec and Disk Write Operations/Sec. For GCP, this value is a sum of compute.googleapis.com/instance/disk/read_ops_count and compute.googleapis.com/instance/disk/write_ops_count. |
Azure, GCP |
Network Usage (MB/s) |
Sum of data transmitted and received across all virtual NIC instances connected to the VM. |
AWS, Azure, GCP, SCVMM, vCenter |
Analyzing vCenter performance through charts
Access through: |
Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications |
Available to: |
View performance metrics: All Access Rights Levels Update performance metrics: All Operator Levels and Higher |
Note: The Performance Charts tab for each VM, host and cluster displays the same performance charts that are displayed in VMware vSphere. Therefore, the charts you see are dependent on whether real-time graphs have been enabled in vSphere. For more information about the performance charts, refer to your VMware documentation.
To view vCenter performance charts:
- From the Inventory tree, select a VM, host, or cluster.
- Click the Performance Charts tab.
The performance charts are loaded the first time you click the Performance Charts tab for the selected VM, host, or cluster, and they default to the time interval of one hour.
- Optional: To see the performance over different periods of time, select from the Time Range menu as required (all performance charts are updated to display the same time periods).
Tip: Refresh the display at any time to receive the latest update from VMware.