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MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Add specific counters to vCenter statistics level

Since we upgraded to vCenter and ESXI 5.0 I noticed a few important statistics counters to be missing (not realtime ones), namely VM IO statistics like datastore.numberReadAveraged.average and datastore.numberWriteAveraged.average.

I used to collect these along with other counters for daily and monthly resource usage statistics via powerCLI, but now they are not being added to the vCenter DB as rollups anymore. For the record, virtualDisk.numberReadAveraged.average and virtualDisk.numberWriteAveraged.average are not being collected either now.

Of course I know how I could set the statistics level from the default level 2 to level 3 in the vCenter Server Settings. However, I don't want to blow up my DB with loads of superfluous data when I only really need a handful of counters to be collected like in the past.

So in a nutshell, is there any way to granularly control which counters are part of which statistics level, so I could just add datastore.numberReadAveraged.average and datastore.numberWriteAveraged.average to my current statistics level?

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6 Replies
marcelo_soares
Champion
Champion

This in fact is a really good question. I will perform some research on this and let you know if I can get anything.

Marcelo Soares
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emma234
Contributor
Contributor

Hi MKguy

Welcome to the communites

I am also facing same issue .

Please let me know once you got any solution.

"He Conquers, Who Conquers Himself".
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MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

This in fact is a really good question. I will perform some research on this and let you know if I can get anything.

Cool, thanks. I hope you'll be able to dig something up. IMO VMware should at least have kept the valueable IOPS statistics with the default statistics level 2. Instead they added quite a few rather unimportant metrics, or metrics that only make sense in real-time (or (r)esxtop) observations because of the short collection interval.

emma234:

I might file a product enhancement (or whatever they call it these days) request. I wonder if I could also be as impudent to file a bug because it "worked" before vCenter5.

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MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Jun 2, 2012 Re: Add specific counters to vCenter statistics level

This in fact is a really good question. I will perform some research on this and let you know if I can get anything.

Hey Marcelo, were you able to find out anything on this matter?

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MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Shameless bump after a while. I really want some longer-term statistics on IOPS.

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MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Seems like I got my solution "by accident" through a support call where I mentioned it as a side note.

Turns out there is a Powershell-based "LevelMappingUtility" which lets you manipulate the statistics level of counters directly, as described in this KB article:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2009532

You can use this tool with pretty much any counter, which is quite nice. With this I was able to get back my beloved datastore.numberReadAveraged.average and datastore.numberWriteAveraged.average VM-level IOPS statistics:

http://alpacapowered.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/control-vcenter-performance-counter-collection-and-get...

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