vCenter Operations – Your Future Performance Dashboard

The pages of vCenter Operations Standard Infrastructure view are centered around the performance characteristics of health, workload, and capacity. Each performance characteristic is a complex summary metric. vCenter Operations Standard performs calculations on combinations of related metrics to create a single value to track a particular aspect of the performance of an object.

The health rating gives you a quick overview of the current state of an object, from an individual virtual machine to the entire virtual infrastructure. vCenter Operations Standard calculates health using the performance of the KPI for the object and its child objects, the total number of threshold violations for all metrics for the object and its child objects, and other aspects of the performance of the object and its child objects. The overall health score for an object ranges from 0 to 100. A high health score indicates that an object is behaving in accordance with its established historical parameters. Most or all of the object metrics, especially its KPI, are within their thresholds. Because changes in behavior often indicate developing problems, if the metrics of an object go outside their calculated thresholds, the health score for the object decreases. As more metrics breach their thresholds, health continues to decrease. Violations by KPI metrics decrease the health more than violation by non-KPI metrics.

The analytics algorithms of vCenter Operations Standard combine the metrics that show the demand placed on a virtual machine or other object in a single value, called the workload. These metrics include CPU utilization, memory usage, and so on. An object with a workload score of 0 is not being used. An object with a workload score over 100 is trying to access more resources than area available to it. In this case, you might have to allocate more resources to the object or move some tasks to other objects. 

The capacity score indicates how close an object is to exhausting the computing resources that are available to it. These computing resources include disk space, memory size, network capacity, and so on. To calculate the capacity score, vCenter Operations Standard combines applicable metrics from the object and applies its analytics algorithms to determine long-term cycles and trends. vCenter Operations Standard uses these results to calculate when an object is likely to run out of a type of resource, such as disk space.

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