Examining the Session and Filter count in vCenter Server

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information on interpreting the Session and Filter count that is captured in the vpxd-profiler log file.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server Appliance

Resolution

To examine the Session and Filter count in vCenter Server:

• Locate the latest vpxd-profiler-NN.log file in the /var/log/vmware/vpxd/ directory. This is usually a file that is not compressed.
• Each iteration of the collection starts with the date. The pullCounters container is shown after that point in the file.
• For example:

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.XXXZ [7F6DA2168700 info 'App']
--> <pullCounters>
<Truncated>
--> /SessionStats/SessionPool/Session/Id='5ce0f4c7-679f-592d-5ccc-e5accdba3f6f'/Username='com.vmware.vim.vsm'/ClientIP=''/HttpSessionObject/Hidden/total 1
--> /SessionStats/SessionPool/Session/Id='567b2f2d-a2da-2bbb-099a-8cdaa0ebe0ac'/Username='root'/ClientIP='XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX'/PropertyCollector/FilterCount/total 0
--> /SessionStats/SessionPool/Session/Id='162ac777-189d-bc20-c32c-afd478aeb97f'/Username='root'/ClientIP='XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX'/PropertyCollector/FilterCount/total 1
--> /SessionStats/SessionPool/Session/Id='40633f47-66c9-dfa3-17ac-4d031db1c201'/Username='root'/ClientIP='XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX'/PropertyCollector/FilterCount/total 0

--> /SessionStats/SessionPool/MaxSessions/total 48--> /SessionStats/SessionPool/NumSessions/total 27

<Truncated>
--> </pullCounters>

• Note: Some information has been truncated in this example.
• In this example, there is one session from VSM with a FilterCount of 1 and 3 VDP sessions (as identified by the IP address), and 1 of those sessions has a FilterCount of 1.
• You may also check for SessionStats/SessionPool/MaxSessions/total for the number of sessions.

Additional Information

• Simply using grep to search for FilterCount is not accurate, as this will display all the data (possibly from multiple iterations) into a single view.
• Locate the latest iteration of the pullCounters to see the most recent view, and compare this to previous iterations to see if the FilterCount is incrementing and decrementing.
• When the FilterCount for a single session increases (usually into the hundreds), unexpected behavior may occur and should be reviewed.