Stats Toolbox – A vSphere Server Performance Counter tool

Finding out which performance counters are available on your vSphere server over which time interval, is not always an easy task. There is of course the Performance Manager entry in the VMware vSphere API Reference, but that is not always the easiest task. Let alone finding out what a specific counter actually represents.

For that reason I decided to create a tool, which I called the Stats Toolbox, that would query the vSphere server to get the actual list of counters it collects for each interval. In the tool I added some extra features that would make working with the performance counters easier.

Stats-ToolboxDuring our VMworld 2014 US breakout session I demonstrated the features of the Stats Toolbox, and I received quite some positive feedback.

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Game of Nines – VM Uptime Report

The end of the year is near again. Time to plan for the new, but also a time to look back on what was there in the past year.

Your vSphere environment is no different. It is time to produce some of those dreaded year reports that will show you how your environment has been doing. And one of the aspects a lot of people are very keen about, is the number 9 game 😉

Game-of-Nines

What was the uptime of the VMs you had running ?

The question popped up on several occasions in the PowerCLI Community as well. So I guess I was not the only one that was looking for a way to calculate the uptime of Virtual Machines.

Bug alert ?: it seems that the PerformanceManager handles vMotions in a strange way. After a vMotion the sys.uptime.latest is reset to 0 (zero). That is understandable, since the VM is now running on a different ESXi host. But it seems that the aggregated metric do not add up all the sys.uptime.latest metrics from different ESXi hosts. So when you use DRS or do vMotions yourself, the produced report will have some serious flaws !

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Script-O-Mania submission – PSTop v1

As most of you should know VMware is organising a scripting contest, called Script-O-Mania. For those of you that haven’t submitted anything yet, hurry up. The closing date is tomorrow (March 15th 2010).

After some reflection I decided to go for a performance monitoring script. I wanted to have the vCenter client performance tab, without having to pay for the vCenter Agent license. And I wanted to offer some of the functionality that esxtop provided on the classic ESX systems.

That’s where my PSTop v1 script came to be.

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PowerCLI & vSphere statistics – Part 2 – Come together

The end of my previous post in this series, see PowerCLI & vSphere statistics – Part 1 – The basics, showed how you could get the statistical values for a specific day.

Depending on the point in time for which you request the values, the sampling interval will be different. For example Historical Interval 2 will return values measured over 30 minute intervals. See also the schematic I included in the previous post.

This sample interval is not always what you want for your reports. Suppose you want to always report hourly values and only for working hours during business days. This post will show you how to accomplish that.

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PowerCLI & vSphere statistics – Part 1 – The basics

Another popular subject in the VMTN PowerCLI community are statistics. Quite often it’s not entirely clear to the user what is available, how the data can be extracted and how PowerShell/PowerCLI can be used to convert the raw metrics into usable reports.

Before you can fully use all that is available, there are a few key concepts that you should understand.

In this series I will try to explain some common questions.

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