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:
- Go to a VM's summary page.
- Expand the Performance drop-down panel.
- If both Summary and Charts are available, click Summary.
- 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.
| 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 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:
- Go to a VM's summary page.
- Expand the Performance drop-down panel.
- Click Charts.
You can select the time range as required, from an hour up to a year.
- If necessary, click Refresh to retrieve the latest data.