Monitor VM Performance Metrics

You can analyze how a VM is performing and what issues may be affecting its performance through the use of performance metrics.

VM performance metrics are updated automatically every night. You can also manually update performance information for individual VMs.

View VM performance metrics

To view VM performance metrics for the last seven days:

  1. Go to a VM's summary page.
  2. Expand the Performance drop-down panel.
  3. If both Summary and Charts are available, click Summary.
  4. If necessary, click Update Performance to retrieve the latest data.

Performance metrics

Because retrieval of memory metrics requires additional configuration, memory metrics may not be available for all 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.

  • For private cloud, consumed memory doesn't include overhead memory. It includes shared memory and memory that might be reserved, but not actually used.
  • For public cloud Linux instances, the consumed memory is the "user" memory and doesn't include other categories such as buffer and cached memory.
  • For GCP Windows instances, consumed memory is calculated using (Total Memory * Usage Percentage).
  • 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 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.

  • For public cloud, disk metrics are an aggregate of metrics for all disks on the VM. However, Commander doesn't display Disk Usage for AWS instance store-backed volumes, and for Azure, disk metrics are retrieved only for OS disks.
  • For vCenter and SCVMM hosts, this metric includes the rates for all VMs running on the host during the collection interval. Not available for NFS.

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 vCenter VM performance charts

For vCenter VMs, the Charts tab displays such information as CPU usage, memory usage and disk performance over time.

To view VM performance charts:

  1. Go to a VM's summary page.
  2. Expand the Performance drop-down panel.
  3. Click Charts.

    You can select the time range as required, from an hour up to a year.

  4. If necessary, click Refresh to retrieve the latest data.