Performance Counters are missing at the virtual machine and/or host level in real time and historical data in vSphere 4.x

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

A number of performance counters identified as available for particular types of objects in vSphere 4.x API Reference are not available via the vSphere Client and other SDK clients. The counters are unavailable regardless of whether the client is connected to vCenter Server or an ESX/ESXi host.

Performance information is unavailable for these counters:

Host

• memory.memUsed.average
• memory.swapunreserved.average
• memory.mementitlement.latest
• clusterServices.cpufairness.latest
• clusterServices.memfairness.latest
• system.heartbeat.summation

Virtual machine

• cpu.guaranteed.latest
• cpu.idle.summation
• cpu.cpuentitlement.latest
• datastore.datastoreIops.average
• datastore.sizeNormalizedDatastoreLatency.average
• memory.heapfree.average
• memory.sharedcommon.average
• memory.state.latest
• network.droppedRx.summation
• network.droppedTx.summation
• system.resourceCpuUsage.average

Resource pool

• memory.active.average
• memory.granted.average

Cluster

• cpu.reservedCapacity.average
• memory.active.average
• memory.granted.average
• memory.reservedCapacity.average
• memory.swapunreserved.average
• memory.swapUsed.average

These counters do not appear in the list of counters when a Real-time Chart Option is selected in the Customize Performance Chart dialog.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded

Resolution

The vSphere 4.1 API Reference document in incorrect with respect to these performance counters. The VMware documentation team has fixed most of these entries in the current release of the vSphere 5.1 API reference document. However, the counters listed below are still stated as available for the ESXi/ESX 4.x release, which is incorrect:

Counters at the host level

• memory.swapunreserved.average

Counters at the virtual machine level

• cpu.idle.summation
• network.droppedRx.summation
• network.droppedTx.summation

Performance data for the unavailable counters is not included in vCenter Server statistics collection from hosts and is, therefore, not available from vCenter Server or the vCenter Server database. Because the counters listed above do not exist in the ESXi/ESX 4.x release, users cannot pull historical and/or real time data for these counters from vCenter Server and/or a direct host connection using the vSphere Client.

Alternative representations of the following unavailable performance counters is available from hosts using esxtop (an SSH session to the ESX/ESXi host) or resxtop (using VMware Command Line Interface to connect to an ESX/ESXi host).

For example, the cpu.idle.summation counter is represented by %IDLE on esxtop/resxtop. For more information, see Interpreting esxtop Statistics.

Additional Information

Note: The API reference for performance counters will not be updated in documents that are already released. VMware recommends you to check the latest API reference documentation for a complete, up-to-date listing. The VMware documentation team is working to fix this listing in future releases of the API reference document for performance counters.

For more information about monitoring and managing vSphere 4.1 performance, see:

• Datacenter Administration Guide: Chapter 9 Working with Performance Statistics.
• Resource Management Guide: Appendix A Performance Monitoring Utilities: resxtop and esxtop

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