End-to-end VMware health and performance dashboards

Dashboard Preview

Challenge

When you have a deployment of VMs, you need to be able to quickly identify when servers go wrong, if you run out of CPU, memory, or disk space, and when VM tools need to be updated. Plus, there’s the risk of snapshots chewing up all available storage space over time causing disk failures. However, getting key stats isn’t always straightforward for Infrastructure Engineers. Often, these metrics aren’t exposed to the wider business unless there’s an outage and end users have sub-standard experiences or even lose access.

Solution

Having all the VM performance and health metrics in one place – for your VMs, VM hosts, and guest VMs – allows engineers to pre-empt issues and fix them before they become problems for end users. To see this, you need a SquaredUp dashboard.

With a full overview of each element of the VMs, including disk space, memory, CPU, tool patch level, and more, it becomes easy to see when there are issues. Engineers are no longer in the dark about the health of their VMs and how every element is performing.

Dashboard walk-through

Here are three dashboards built in SquaredUp that give full visibility of different core aspects of a VM deployment:

• A sample overview dashboard
• Clusters dashboard
• Hosts and guests dashboard

You can create these for yourself in SquaredUp.

Sample overview dashboard

This Sample Dashboard shows, in the top left, a movable diagram of the hosts shows you how your VMware topology is configured. Below that you can see the health states of all VMs in VMware – green indicates that they’re all healthy – and you can drill into unhealthy ones for more details. There is also a graph showing the resource pool CPU usage.

In the next column over are the alarms - VMware’s critical alerts when servers go wrong. Below that tile is the VM tools version information so an admin can easily see which VM tools need to be updated on a specific VM.

Down the righthand column are CPU, memory, and disk stats that let you identify potential performance issues.

Across the bottom is the snapshots tile. This lets you see recent snapshots along with important information on each, like how much disk space it is consuming.

Clusters dashboard

The second dashboard highlights information about clusters.

The top left tile shows Datastore Latency to help identify potential performance issues between your VMware hosts and the datastore hosting the VMs themselves. To the right are the number of VMs powered on and powered off, for visibility at a glance.

The Memory and CPU tiles along the bottom of the VMware dashboard highlight potential capacity issues caused by a host’s CPU being pegged or running out of memory for its VMs.

Hosts and guests dashboard

The third VMware dashboard that helps provide visibility focuses on the VM guests and secondarily on the hosts.

Across the top of the dashboard is the health state tile for the guests. As soon as one turns unhealthy, it’ll turn red and the engineers can drill down on the unhealthy VM for more details. The bottom right tile is similar, showing the health state tile for the VMW hosts.

Below the health state tile are three graphs that reveal the power state, the top 10 guest VM memory usage, and the version of the VMTools. These tiles help identify as soon as a VM is powered off, spotting performance issues, and whether a tool requires patching to maintain security.

Out-of-the-box dashboards

Once you add the VMware plugin to your SquaredUp workspace, you'll see your live data automatically loaded up in two out-of-the-box dashboards:

Virtual Machines

Instantly view the number of VMs, their health state, unhealthy VMs and a breakdown of virtual machines by version.

Hosts

Visualize the health of your hosts, build versions, alarms plus CPU usage and available memory.

Create your free dashboards

To get access to these out-of-the-box dashboards, or easily create your own like the ones at the top of this post, just add the VMware plugin to your workspace.

Simply create a free account to get started, or check out this video to see how easy it is to use our Dashboard Designer:

Play Dashboard Designer

To see what other dashboards you can create, check out our Dashboard Gallery.