VMware esxtop gives you more than just metrics, it helps with troubleshooting your environment and it shows you where the problem actually is. Similar to the Unix “Top” command, esxtop gives you real-time system performance data of your ESX/ESXi servers. One of the tricks being that you have to access this through the command line interface of the individual server.
To help use this tool, Zenoss announced a Free Zenpack to perform ESX/ESXi server monitoring with esxtop. The Zenpack does the following:
- Automatically captures and graphs performance metrics from ESX/ESXi servers
- Allows the setting of thresholds and exception alerting based on performance metrics and events as they occur
- Keeps historical data for in-depth root cause analysis
With Zenoss’s VMware ESX Server Zenpack, you get visibility into your ESX/ESXi server and you are also able to proactively manage it. A perfect example of this is over-provisioning of virtual CPUs; a condition that without esxtop is hard to diagnosis. With Zenoss, you can easily monitor resource contention issues and proactively alert before there is service impact.
Additionally, with the monitoring capabilities provided by Zenoss, this Zenpack allows correlation between esxtop metrics and performance data captured from other managed virtual and physical devices.
Current 3.x Zenoss Core and Enterprise users can install the Zenpack as of today. New to Zenoss? The VMware ESX Server Zenpack comes preinstalled with the latest release of Zenoss Core.
- Existing Zenoss 3.X Enterprise and Core users can access the Zenpack here.
- The documentation for the Zenpack is in the Zenoss Extended Monitoring Guide. Please note the prerequisites and the requirement to install the VMware vSphere CLI.
- For new users, the VMware Infrastructure ESX Server ZenPack will be part of the 3.0.3 release. Zenoss Core can be downloaded here along with the installation guide.