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 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 data for individual VMs.
GCP prerequisite: To allow Commander to obtain performance data for GCP VMs, the service account used to add GCP cloud account must have at least the Monitoring Viewer role. For more information, see Grant permissions to the Commander service account.
Important: Memory usage monitoring requires additional configuration for public cloud instances. See:
- Monitor Memory Metrics for EC2 Linux Instances
- Monitor Memory Metrics for EC2 Windows Instances
- Monitor Memory Metrics for Azure Instances
- Monitor Memory Metrics for GCP Instances
VM performance metrics
The following performance metrics are available in the Weekly Performance Summary for a VM.
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.
| 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.
| 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 |
View 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: | Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications |
Available to: | View performance metrics: All Access Rights Levels Update performance metrics: All Operator Levels and Higher |
- From the inventory tree, select a VM.
- Select the Performance Summary tab.
- To update the performance summary for a VM so that it includes the most recent performance data, select Update Performance then OK.
Analyze vCenter performance
The following vCenter performance charts are only available when the Time Range is set to 1 Hour:
- Disk Rate (KBps)
- Disk Requests (Number)
- Network Rate (Mbps)
- Network Requests (Number)
The following vCenter performance charts are only available when the Time Range is greater than 1 Hour:
- Disk (KBps)
- Network (MBps)
- Space (GB) — only available for VMs
Access: | Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications |
Available to: | View performance metrics: All Access Rights Levels Update performance metrics: All Operator Levels and Higher |
- From the inventory tree, select a vCenter VM, host, or cluster.
- Select 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 default to the time range of one hour.
- Optional: To see the performance over different periods of time, set the Time Range as required.
All performance charts are updated to display the same time range.