Capturing vCenter Server service resource usage for analysis

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

The vimptop utility comes standard with vCenter Server Appliance.

vimtop is similar to the standard "top" utility in Linux, except that
--top is intended to show operating system processes and resource usage
--vimtop is customized to show vSphere services and their resource usage.
Please note that the "top" utility is also available in the vCenter Server

You can run vimtop in batch mode for an extended period of time and analyze the output later.

This can be helpful whether you need to capture the information outside of normal working hours, and trigger it using the cron utility. Or you could use it to capture a particular event that is known to happen at a particular time, and be able to review that information.

The usage of the vimtop command is:
 /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/vimtop/vimtop [-h] [-v] [-b] [-c config_name] [-p | - d seconds] [-n num]
-h, --help print this help message and exit
-v, --version print only version information and exit
-b, --batch enables record (batch) mode
-c, --config=config_name specify config name to be used
-p, -d, --period=seconds sets the update period in seconds
-n, --num-updates=num runs for only n iterations

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.x
VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x

Resolution

To run a vimtop batch capture for 1800 samples, taking 1 hour, you could run the command:

samples='1800'; delay='2' path="/var/core"; vimtop -b -n "${samples}" -p "${delay}" > "${path}"/$(hostname)_$(date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%S")_vimtop.csv

The delay is in seconds, so therefore 1800 * 2 seconds / 60 seconds/minute / 60 minutes /hour = 1 hour.

Please note that you can capture whatever number of samples, delay, and time period you think is needed.

If the capture will be for 600 samples or less, you could also use Windows performance manager or other such utilities, or Microsoft Excel.

Additional Information

Using the vimtop Plug-In to Monitor the Resource Use of Services (vmware.com)
Generating a vpxd live core dump to troubleshoot vCenter performance issues