Monitoring the Nutanix Acropolis Server

eG Enterprise provides a specialized model for monitoring Nutanix Acropolis servers with VMs that host server applications.

Figure 1 : Layer model of the Nutanix Acropolis server

Each layer of this model is mapped to tests that report on the resource usage of the hypervisor and the VMs inside-out, and point you to resource-hungry VMs and applications. Using the metrics reported by this model, administrators can find quick and accurate answers to the following performance queries:

  • Is the Acropolis server available over the network? If so, how responsive is the server to requests?
  • Is the content cache sized enough to handle requests, or are cache hits very low?
  • How much memory did deduplication save in the content cache?
  • Are any physical disks marked for removal? Has data from that disk been migrated?
  • Which physical disk is currently offline?
  • Is any physical disk being over-utilized?
  • Are there any latent physical disks?
  • How is the I/O performance of the physical disks?
  • Is I/O load balanced across all physical disks?
  • Is any physical disk consuming bandwidth excessively when processing I/O?
  • How is the I/O load on the storage?
  • Is the storage processing I/O requests quickly?
  • Is too much bandwidth being consumed when processing I/O?
  • Is the AHV sized with adequate storage resources? If not, what type of storage is running short of space - the SSDs? or the SATA HDDs?
  • How many VMs are operating on the Acropolis server? What is their IP address and which OS are they running?
  • Which VMs are currently powered off or suspended?
  • Which VMs have been newly added and which ones were recently removed from the server?
  • Which VM is the CVM of a cluster?
  • Is any VM consuming the physical CPU, memory, network, and I/O resources of the Acropolis server, abnormally?
  • Which VM is utilizing the CPU, memory, network, and I/O resources allocated to it, excessively? Which process on the VM is causing this abnormal resource consumption?

This chapter will discuss each layer of Figure 1 in great detail.