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fsckit
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

esxtop in batch mode does not use config file

I am trying to collect disk statistics using esxtop (resxtop would be fine too), but it appears that it ignores my saved configuration.  If I run it normally, it does read the config file, but not in batch mode.  The resulting file is too large for me to import into Excel.  Anyone else experiencing this?

I suppose I could attempt some post-processing with awk or Perl, but what I really would like is for the program to behave as describe in the documentation and to use the saved config file when in batch mode, just as it does in interactive mode.

Here is my current .esxtop50rc, saved in my home directory on the vMA:

vMA:~> cat .esxtop50rc

ABcDEFghij

aBcDefgHijKLmnOpq

ABCdEfGhijkl

ABcdeFGhIjklmnop

aBCDEFGH

AbcDEFGHIJKLmno

ABCDeF

ABCDe

9u

I have also activated ssh and gone on the ESXi host and run esxtop there, but I get the same behavior.

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tomtom901
Commander
Commander

~ # esxtop -b -c .customFile -d 10 -n 2 > esxtop.csv

Works fine for me, on VMware ESXi 5.5.0 build-1331820. Contents of the .customProfile file:

~ # cat .customFile

AbcDeFghij

aBcDefgHijKLmnOpq

ABCdEfGhijkl

ABcdeFGhIjklmnop

aBCDEFGH

AbcDEFGHIJKLmno

ABCDeF

ABCDe

5c

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fsckit
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

tomtom901 wrote:

~ # esxtop -b -c .customFile -d 10 -n 2 > esxtop.csv

Works fine for me, on VMware ESXi 5.5.0 build-1331820. Contents of the .customProfile file:

~ # cat .customFile

AbcDeFghij

aBcDefgHijKLmnOpq

ABCdEfGhijkl

ABcdeFGhIjklmnop

aBCDEFGH

AbcDEFGHIJKLmno

ABCDeF

ABCDe

5c

Thanks for the response. What configuration does that customFile file give you?  When I tried it, it just looked like the default esxtop display. I ran it in batch mode and redirected to a file, and then I did a 'head -1' on the output file.  As expected, it looked like it had all the fields, such as "CPU Pwer State",  "Interrupts/Second", etc.

I am trying to get only disk data, so I do this:

~ # esxtop (Then "u" for disk utilization screen, then "W" to save the config to the default file.)

~ # esxtop -c .esxtop50rc -d 10  (To verify it just displays disk info.)

~ # esxtop -b -c .esxtop50rc -d 10 -n 2 > esxtop.out

~ # head -1 esxtop.out


The head command shows all the esxtop fields, not just the disk fields. The output file is only three lines, but is 96,000 words and over 4 MB in size.

This is a different ESXi server than I was using last time. Our hosts are at version 5.0.0.

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tomtom901
Commander
Commander

I removed the NWLD field, which didn't show up in the csv output afterwards. Will disk only later tonight and let you know.

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fsckit
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks. I tried again, following the steps here: http://vmtoday.com/2009/09/the-skinny-on-esxtop/

This site specifies to go into each view ("c" for CPU, "m" for memory, etc) and turn off the fields you don't want, then go into the view you do want, and then save your config file. I turned off all the fields in all the other views, then saved a config file.  Works great when I launch in interactive mode, but batch mode still shows all the fields, all the time, on every ESXi host I've tried this on.

This seems to be a common problem. I see many other posts from people with this issue, though I've not found any recent posts. Perhaps this is a bug that has returned.

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tinybrownteddyb
Contributor
Contributor

I took apart cfg file and if you noticed, if the Letter is Capitalized then that field is selected, for instance "u" disk stats "abcdefghijklmnop" is all turned off and AbcdefghijklmnOp means name and Vaai Stats is turned on. Just vi the file and turn all to small caps, load the file esxtop -c smallcapsfile and turn on the settings you want.

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