esxtop and resxtop sometimes display incorrect latency values

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

In some virtualization environments, esxtop and resxtop will occasionally display incorrect latency values for one or more disks. This will typically show up as DAVG, KAVG, GAVG, or QAVG values that are negative or are extremely high (often above 20,000). These incorrect values can potentially trigger alarms in monitoring tools or make an analyst think something might be wrong with the disk.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.2
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.1
VMware vCenter Server 8.0
VMware vCenter Server 8.0.2
VMware vCenter Server 8.0.1

Cause

These incorrect values displayed by esxtop or resxtop do not indicate a problem with the hardware; they are purely a reporting issue in esxtop or resxtop.

Resolution

Currently there is no resolution to the issue. This will be fixed in the future release.

Workaround:

To workaround the issue, disregard these extreme disk latency values reported by esxtop or resxtop.