VMware vSphere Monitoring

VMware vSphere is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform.

Why use a Telegraf plugin for VMware vSphere?

vSphere monitoring can help optimize resources across your virtual machines, ensuring the health of your applications. vSphere collects metrics every 20 seconds from ESXi and stores this information in vCenter RAM. Unfortunately, this data is only stored in vCenter for one hour. However, if you want to have this data available for analysis, you can use the VSphere Telegraf Plugin to collect and store this data in a long-term store like InfluxDB.

InfluxAce Jorge de la Cruz presented a webinar and has written blogs on how to collect these rich metrics with Telegraf and InfluxDB. He even shows how to build dashboards with Grafana.

How to monitor VMware vSphere using the Telegraf plugin

The VMware vSphere plugin uses the vSphere API to gather metrics from multiple vCenter servers.

• Clusters
• Hosts
• VMs
• Datastores

Key VMware vSphere metrics to use for monitoring

Some of the important VMware vSphere metrics that you should proactively monitor include:

• Cluster Stats
  • Cluster services: CPU, memory, failover
  • CPU: total, usage
  • Memory: consumed, total, vmmemctl
  • VM operations: # changes, clone, create, deploy, destroy, power, reboot, reconfigure, register, reset, shutdown, standby, vmotion
• Host Stats:
  • CPU: total, usage, cost, mhz
  • Datastore: iops, latency, read/write bytes, # reads/writes
  • Disk: commands, latency, kernel reads/writes, # reads/writes, queues
  • Memory: total, usage, active, latency, swap, shared, vmmemctl
  • Network: broadcast, bytes, dropped, errors, multicast, packets, usage
  • Power: energy, usage, capacity
  • Res CPU: active, max, running
  • Storage Adapter: commands, latency, # reads/writes
  • Storage Path: commands, latency, # reads/writes
  • System Resources: cpu active, cpu max, cpu running, cpu usage, mem allocated, mem consumed, mem shared, swap
  • System: uptime
  • Flash Module: active VMDKs
• VM Stats:
  • CPU: demand, usage, readiness, cost, mhz
  • Datastore: latency, # reads/writes
  • Disk: commands, latency, # reads/writes, provisioned, usage
  • Memory: granted, usage, active, swap, vmmemctl
  • Network: broadcast, bytes, dropped, multicast, packets, usage
  • Power: energy, usage
  • Res CPU: active, max, running
  • System: operating system uptime, uptime
  • Virtual Disk: seeks, # reads/writes, latency, load
• Datastore stats:
  • Disk: Capacity, provisioned, used

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