Metrics and Thresholds

Display

Metric

Threshold

Explanation

CPU

%RDY

10

Overprovisioning of vCPUs, excessive usage of vSMP or a limit(check %MLMTD) has been set. See Jason’s explanation for vSMP VMs

CPU

%CSTP

3

Excessive usage of vSMP. Decrease amount of vCPUs for this particular VM. This should lead to increased scheduling opportunities.

CPU

%SYS

20

The percentage of time spent by system services on behalf of the world. Most likely caused by high IO VM. Check other metrics and VM for possible root cause

CPU

%MLMTD

0

The percentage of time the vCPU was ready to run but deliberately wasn’t scheduled because that would violate the “CPU limit” settings. If larger than 0 the world is being throttled due to the limit on CPU.

CPU

%SWPWT

5

VM waiting on swapped pages to be read from disk. Possible cause: Memory overcommitment.

MEM

MCTLSZ

1

If larger than 0 host is forcing VMs to inflate balloon driver to reclaim memory as host is overcommited.

MEM

SWCUR

1

If larger than 0 host has swapped memory pages in the past. Possible cause: Overcommitment.

MEM

SWR/s

1

If larger than 0 host is actively reading from swap(vswp). Possible cause: Excessive memory overcommitment.

MEM

SWW/s

1

If larger than 0 host is actively writing to swap(vswp). Possible cause: Excessive memory overcommitment.

MEM

CACHEUSD

0

If larger than 0 host has compressed memory. Possible cause: Memory overcommitment.

MEM

ZIP/s

0

If larger than 0 host is actively compressing memory. Possible cause: Memory overcommitment.

MEM

UNZIP/s

0

If larger than 0 host has accessing compressed memory. Possible cause: Previously host was overcommited on memory.

MEM

N%L

80

If less than 80 VM experiences poor NUMA locality. If a VM has a memory size greater than the amount of memory local to each processor, the ESX scheduler does not attempt to use NUMA optimizations for that VM and “remotely” uses memory via “interconnect”. Check “GST_ND(X)” to find out which NUMA nodes are used.

NETWORK

%DRPTX

1

Dropped packets transmitted, hardware overworked. Possible cause: very high network utilization

NETWORK

%DRPRX

1

Dropped packets received, hardware overworked. Possible cause: very high network utilization

DISK

GAVG

25

Look at “DAVG” and “KAVG” as the sum of both is GAVG.

DISK

DAVG

25

Disk latency most likely to be caused by array.

DISK

KAVG

2

Disk latency caused by the VMkernel, high KAVG usually means queuing. Check “QUED”.

DISK

QUED

1

Queue maxed out. Possibly queue depth set to low. Check with array vendor for optimal queue depth value.

DISK

ABRTS/s

1

Aborts issued by guest(VM) because storage is not responding. For Windows VMs this happens after 60 seconds by default. Can be caused for instance when paths failed or array is not accepting any IO for whatever reason.

DISK

RESETS/s

1

The number of commands reset per second.

DISK

CONS/s

20

SCSI Reservation Conflicts per second. If many SCSI Reservation Conflicts occur performance could be degraded due to the lock on the VMFS.