The Inside View Dashboard

Though the Measures dashboard provides all the metrics collected from within a particular VM, these metrics are indicative of only the current health of the VM, and enable you to identify only the current issues related to the VM. To obtain a true picture of the health of a VM however, knowledge of the current status of the VM might alone not suffice; in addition to this, you would have to perform the following:

• Analyze the overall performance of a VM over time to deduce performance trends and past problems;
• Closely observe the changes in the current and historical usage of each of the virtual resources (CPU/memory/disk), so as to deduce usage patterns and potential resource contentions;
• Study the network traffic handled and bandwidth used by the VM over time, so that sudden/steady increases in traffic/bandwidth can be promptly detected;
• Determine the uptime of a VM by observing how long the VM has been up and running and how frequently it was rebooted during a specific time window;

To enable you to perform the aforesaid analysis, eG Enterprise offers dedicated System and Network dashboards for every guest operating system on an ESX server. The sections that will follow will help you understand each of these dashboards clearly.