ESXTOP Batch mode help

[alfiek]

Morning everyone - I'm having a bit of a problem with my batch mode exports. I'm not sure if this is a limit of esxtop or I'm missing something. My goal is to be able to track the vmhba stats and track the about of traffic coming from vm (I/O traffic)

What I have been doing is:

1. Loading esxtop going to (D) for disk

2. Going to (F) for fields and picking (J) for Latency Status

3. Using (W) to write the config file

after that I run

esxtop -b -c /admin/.esxtop3rc > vmhba.csv

the problem is - everytime I export it seems like I'm getting every last drop of data that esxtop has. I've tried several different ways of doing this and every time I seem to get the same export. I've included a sample of my exports

Would love some help.

Thanks

[Rogg23]

I have been looking at the exact same thing today as we want to do some disk load testing, and I am having the same problem

I have written my config file to the tmp directory.

For all windows other than disk adapter and disk device, I have deselected all fields and written this to my settings file in the tmp directory.

So I am running batch mode command as:

esxtop -b -c /tmp/disksetup -d 2 -n 30 > /tmp/disk.csv

as with alfiek, it also outputs everything which is a problem as it has too many columns to open in Excel so I can't do much with it.

If I run esxtop interactively specifying my settings file, it only lists the disk settings as expected.

Am I missing something with the filtering, do I need to do something else to only export the fields I am interested in?

Please help!

Thanks,

Roger.

[FredPeterson]

I've never found a way to limit the batch export.

Since Excel can't open the data in a useful manner what you can do instead is use Windows Perfmon to view the data. This is actually more useful then Excel since you can see correlations more cleanly.

You'll need a hefty machine and memory to handle loading a huge csv though.

[Rogg23]

What is the purpose of setting up 'interesting' fields in interactive mode if batch mode just exports everything?

I tried to open a CSV in Office 2010 which has 16k columns, this wasn't enough and the full sheet couldn't load.

There must be someway to filter the output effectively, otherwise it isn't particularly useful other than as an interactive tool.

[Yann77]

Hi all,

I got the same results with esxtop in batch mode, it does not consider the ~/.esxtop4rc or ~/.esxtop3rc config files.

I suppose one will have to report this issue through a support request.

A workaround would be to filter the output of esxtop before to write it to the csv file using linux parsing tools.

This is documented in the below KB:

Exporting esxtop performance data as a CSV file and manipulating it from the command-line

I have read about esxplot as well that could help analyzing esxtop output instead of using perfmon or excel: http://vpivot.com/2009/10/21/esxtop-analysis-with-esxplot/

I do not know if it has been released yet.

thanks,

Yann