Categories: vSphere 6.5

VIMTOP – Monitor vCenter Server Appliance 6.5

vimtop is tool to monitor vCenter server appliance 6.5 performance information and statistics. vimtop is similar to esxtop which is available with ESXi. vimtop is the tool which helps you to troubleshoot performance issues or bottlenecks in the vCenter Server appliance

To launch vimtop, you will need to SSH to a VCSA 6.0 system and type “vimtop” in either the applianceshell or in a regular bash shell. When vimtop is launched, It displays the memory and CPU usage information along with the process or service name running on the VCSA along with its respective memory and CPU usage percentage.

vimtop looks very similar to esxtop but you will quickly notice there are many UI improvements which really makes navigating the interface much simpler. The first thing that should stand out to you is the use of colors to help improve the readability of all the metrics. You will also notice that you can quickly navigate through current list view by either scrolling up and down or side to side using the directional arrow keys. When a item is selected is also clearly highlighted which is a huge plus in my opinion when needing to troubleshoot and watch for a particular entry or stat.

Find the below image shows selecting a specific row in vimtop .

There are three primary views in vimtop: Processes, Disks & Networks statistics which can be toggled using keyboard shortcuts. All navigation is performed through a series of global keyboard shortcuts similar to esxtop. There is actually a quite a few of them and you can quickly see the list by hitting the “h” key at any time for the help menu.

Here is the complete list of keyboard shortcuts for your reference

Keyboard Key	Description
esc	Clear existing selection and jump back to Process view
w	Write the configure out the current settings goes to a configuration file located in vimtop/vimtop.xml
s	Set the refresh interval (seconds)
f	Display all available CPUs overview
t	Display Tasks currently managed by the appliance
g	Expand top 4 physical CPUs currently available to the appliance
h	Help menu
u	Show/Hide the unit headers
i	Show/Hide the top line
o	Network view
p	Pause the screen
l	Select a particular column
delete	Remove selected column
PgUp/PgDn	Select first and last row and scroll to it
–	Collapse selected item
+	Expand selected item
home/end	Select first and last column and scroll to it
left/right arrow	Select column
up/down arrow	Select row
enter	Display more info about a select item
<	Move selected column to the left
>	Move selected column to the right
k	Disk View
m	Display memory overview information
n	Show/Hide the name headers
c	Add new column
d	Add selected column in descending order or to switch column to descending order
x	Select optimal column width
z	Clear sort order
a	Add selected column in ascending order or to switch column to ascending order
q	Quit
~	Display vimtop in Back/White mode

If you are more of a visual person, I have also created a visual keyboard layout of all the vimtop commands which might be handy to print out and post on your wall. I actually got this awesome idea from one of our internal Wikis and I have created a new layout to match all the commands that are currently in vimtop.

For each of the three views, you can also add and remove different columns just like you could with esxtop using the “c” character. You can then select or de-select columns by using the spacebar for the metrics you wish to be displayed in the current view.

I figure it would also be useful to have a table of all the metrics and their definitions as it is a bit difficult to read while in vimtop itself.

PROCESSES

Metric ID	Description
PID	Process identifier
CMD	Command name used to start the process as it is seen by the underlying system
CMDLINE	The full command line of this process used during startup
NAME	User readable name of the process
THREADS	Number of native threads currently running in the process
%CPU (CPU Usage)	Current CPU usage in percent for this process
MHZ	Current CPU usage in MHz for this process
CPU	Total CPU time used by the process during last measurement cycle (sum of cpu.used.system and cpu.used.user)
SYS	CPU time spent by process in the system (kernel) routines
USR	CPU time spent by process in the user land
%MEM (Memory Usage)	Physical memory usage in percent for this process
MEM	Physical (resident) memory used by this process
VIRT	Total virtual memory size of this process (the complete working set including resident and swapped memory)
SHR	Size of the shared code – these are any shared objects (so or DLL) loaded by the process
TEXT	Code segment size of the process without any shared libraries
DATA	Data segment size of the process (for managed process like JVM this includes the managed code also)
FD	Total number of file descriptors opened by the process
FILS	Number of all file objects opened by the process (sum of files directories and links)
FILE	Number of regular files currently opened by the process
DIR	Number of directories currently opened by the process
LNK	Number of symbolic links currently opened by the process
DEVS	Number of devices (char or block) opened by the process
CHAR	Number of descriptors opened to character devices
BLCK	Number of descriptors opened to block devices
CHNS	Number of all communication channels opened by the process (either sockets or FIFOs)
SCKS	Number of sockets (TCP\|UDP\|raw) currently opened by the process
FIFO	Pipes (named or not) opened by the process

DISKS

Metric ID	Description
DISK/PART	Storage disk / partition identifier
IOS	Number of I/O operations currently in progress on this disk (should go to zero)
IOTIME	Milliseconds spent doing I/O operations on this disk / partition (increases for a nonzero number of I/O operations)
LAT	disk / partition access latency (in milliseconds) calculated using the total amount of time spend doing I/O divided by the total amount of I/O operations done during last measurement interval
READS	Number of reads issued to this disk / partition and completed successfully during last measurement interval
RDMRG	Adjacent to each other reads on this disk / partition merged for efficiency
READ	Number of reads per second issued to this disk / partition
RDSCTRS	Number of sectors read successfully from this disk / partition during last measurement interval
WRITES	Number of writes issued to this disk / partition and completed successfully during last measurement interval
WRMRG	Adjacent to each other writes on this disk / partition merged for efficiency
WRITE	Number of writes per second issued to this disk / partition
WRSCTRS	Number of sectors wrote successfully to this disk / partition during last measurement interval

NETWORKS

Metric ID	Description
INTF	Interface name
TRGPT	Total throughput of this interface (Rx + Tx) in kilobytes
RATE	The activity of this network interface in kBps
RXED	Amount of data (in kilobytes) received during last measurement interval
RXRATE	Rate of received data through this interface in kBps
TXED	Amount of data (in kilobytes) transmitted during last measurement interval
TXRATE	Rate of data transmission through this interface in kBps
RXMCAST	Number of multicast packets received on this interface during last measurement interval
RXDROP	Number of data rx-packets dropped during last measurement interval
TXDROP	Number of data packets dropped upon transmission during last measurement interval
DROPPED	Number of dropped packets through this network interface because of running out of buffers during last measurement cycle
ERRS	Total number of faults (Tx and Rx) on this interface
RXERRS	The sum of receive errors rx-fifo errors and rx-frame errors
TXERRS	The sum of transmit errors tx-fifo errors and carrier errors
FIFOERRS	FIFO overrun errors on this interface caused by host being busy to serve the NIC hardware
CLLSNS	Collisions detected on the transmission medium

Click on “o” to switch to Network performance view of vCenter Server appliance. It displays as similar to esxtop such as RXRATE, TXRATE, dropped ,errors in the VCSA network stats.

Rajesh Radhakrishnan