VMware Communities: VirtualCenter Performance Counters
Introduction The following table of VirtualCenter (VC) performance counters lists the counters with a description of their purpose. We’re still building out this page so if you want to see detail on a particular counter just post a message at the bottom of this article. I’ll update the article, as needed.Remember, with the exception of ready time, statistic levels one and two are the only ones needed for 99% of the performance monitoring and analysis out there. Don’t spend many of your own cycles worrying about levels three and four!
For information on enabling VC to display and archive these counters see the Understanding VirtualCenter Performance Statistics article.
Understanding VirtualCenter Measurement WindowsBefore you continue, you should know that all total count metrics reported by VC are reported over the sample window. When you’re looking at live stats, this sample window is 20 seconds. When you’re looking at archive stats, it will depend on the interval duration. That duration could be five minutes, 30 minutes, two hours, or one day.
This causes a lot of confusion when comparing esxtop results to live VC results to archived VC results. As an example, ready time might be reported as 10% in esxtop. In live VC results this amount of ready time would be reported as 2000 ms (10% of the 20s window.) In one day archive results, the same number would be reported as 30,000 ms (10% of the five minute interval duration.) All of these numbes reflect the same amount of ready time.
More information about CPU, Memory, Disk, Network and Other Statistics you can find here: http://tiny.cc/8IQFP
