Data collection intervalsĭata collection intervals define how frequently monitoring data is collected (i.e., its granularity) and how long it remains archived. To prevent overloading your vCenter Server’s database, you can control the volume of data vSphere collects and the amount of time that data is retained by setting data collection intervals and data collection levels. vSphere data collection intervals and levelsĪ large vSphere environment emits a lot of monitoring data. We’ll also take a look at how to configure vSphere to use a syslog forwarder to enable you to send logs to an external log management tool for long-term storage and analysis.

view real-time data from your ESXi hypervisors with vSphere’s esxtop command-line tool.

use the vSphere Client to visualize and set alarms on key metrics and logs from your environment.

In this post, we’ll be covering two primary tools for accessing metrics from vSphere so that you can gain insight into the inventory objects that make up your virtual environment. VSphere has built-in tools that allow you to quickly access monitoring data. Inventory objects are any physical or virtual components of your environment that can be monitored and alerted on, including virtual machines, ESXi hosts, clusters, and resource pools. VMware vSphere collects data on the performance and resource usage of inventory objects and archives it in a database on the vCenter Server database. We’ll also show you how and where to access VMware events and logs to help you gain further insight into your virtual environment.

In this post, we’ll cover how you can access these key vSphere metrics using a few of VMware’s internal monitoring tools.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key VMware vSphere metrics you can monitor to help ensure the health and performance of your virtual environment.

Vmware vcenter client