Capacity Planner bandwidth and utilization

[j_d_vmware]

Anyone know where I can find some stats for Capacity Planner Collector that shows how much overhead it puts on the systems that are being monitored?

[Ken_Cline]

No stats that I'm aware of, but the overhead is negligible. The biggest overhead is in network traffic, and that's just a trickle until it gets aggregated.

[VirtualElite]

Per the Capacity Planner Installation Guide, you can expect peaks of 20KBps during the collection process for each data collector. This number is based on collecting approximately 500 counters from 4 target systems. Each Data Collector can have a maximum of 500 target systems (I would recommend no more than 250-300 per collector). With that in mind, you could see max network peaks of 2.5MBps per Data Collector.In practice, this is usually a lower number, but it's good to know what the maximum is for planning purposes.

[amvmware]

Agree with previous comments - you don't install an agent on the systems to be monitored and generally inventory data is collected once a day and performance data 1 per hour from each server. CP does not impact server performance and when you consider that the majority of the servers are running at 7-9% utilisation - any resource utilisation on a server would be negligible.

Network traffic would increase during the data collection - but again never had a customer complain that the data transfer is impacting network performance.