How does TSM calculate the High memory utilization alert; HighPhysicalMemoryUtilization

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Here are the details of how TSM calculates, and consequently alerts you, when there is a high memory condition:
 

Running the IC-Health asl script shows that a device is in a state of high memory utilization.

Using the LINUX command line, we see this results to the command TOP:

top - 18:29:09 up 73 days, 20:12, 0 users, load average: 0.04, 0.17, 0.14
Tasks: 198 total, 1 running, 196 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.2%us, 2.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 93.7%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 49300608k total, 47011892k used, 2288716k free, 422076k buffers
Swap: 16773112k total, 155072k used, 16618040k free, 27035724k cached

top - 18:29:11 up 73 days, 20:12, 0 users, load average: 0.04, 0.17, 0.14
Tasks: 198 total, 1 running, 196 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.4%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 49300608k total, 47012280k used, 2288328k free, 422076k buffers
Swap: 16773112k total, 155072k used, 16618040k free, 27035744k cached

top - 18:29:32 up 73 days, 20:13, 0 users, load average: 0.09, 0.17, 0.14
Tasks: 198 total, 1 running, 196 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.2%us, 2.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 93.7%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 49300608k total, 47012008k used, 2288600k free, 422084k buffers
Swap: 16773112k total, 155072k used, 16618040k free, 27035764k cached

top - 18:29:34 up 73 days, 20:13, 0 users, load average: 0.09, 0.17, 0.14
Tasks: 198 total, 1 running, 196 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.1%us, 0.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.8%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 49300608k total, 47012132k used, 2288476k free, 422084k buffers
Swap: 16773112k total, 155072k used, 16618040k free, 27035780k cached

Environment

Smarts 10.X

Resolution

When smarts calculates HighPhysicalMemoryUtilization it uses the following steps:

• A percentage  is calculated by dividing the  physical memory (calculated by the reported ResidentSetSize (RSS)) with the TotalPhysicalMemory, and multiplying it by 100.
• If this percentage is greator  the value of 90, and an alert is generated .

Looking at the top output provided, the machine has 49GB memory in total, but 47GB has already been used, which is higher than 90%.  Therefore, when this condition is seen on a LINUX server, a HighPhysicalMemoryUtilization will be generated by Smarts SHM.