VM monitoring and metrics

This section describes how to work with VM monitoring and metrics

The platform may automatically enable metrics for all VMs. If you have the privilege to Manage virtual machine monitoring and it is configured in your virtual datacenter, you can enable the option to Fetch metrics data to get built-in metrics from the hypervisor or public cloud region, as well as any custom metrics defined for your VM.

Enable VM monitoring and metrics

To enable VM monitoring and metrics:

Go to myCloud → Virtual datacenters
Edit a VM
Go to Monitoring
Select the Fetch metrics data checkbox. This will retrieve all metrics while the VM is deployed
Select from the available options, for example, for AWS offers Detailed or Basic monitoring.
Select the individual metrics you would like to display for your VM. The functionality and list of available metrics depend on the underlying virtualization technology and the platform configuration.

The abq-cpu_usage and the abq-ram_usage metrics are Abiquo standardized metrics. They show the CPU usage and RAM usage as a percentage (not a hundredth of a percent as for CPU on ESXi).

The platform will always retrieve all metrics, so you can change the metrics to display at any time. And you can use any metric for alarms and alerts, even if you do not display it. You may need to wait a short time for the first metrics to load.

Display metrics for a VM

To display and filter metrics for a VM:

Go to Virtual datacenters → Virtual appliances
Open the virtual appliance
On the VM icon → click the graph metrics symbol
The metrics panel will open and you can dynamically filter and select which metrics to display.

To update the display of a metric, click the round-arrow refresh button.

To configure the display of the metric:

Select the funnel filter button
Set the following as required
1. Granularity, which is how often the metric is sampled
2. Statistic, which determines how the raw values will be processed over time
3. Last period, which is how long the display will look behind at the processed data
4. Metric dimensions for metrics with more than one element, such as multiple hard disks, you can display metric dimensions, which are metrics for separate elements.
  1. To view metric dimensions, click Get dimensions. Select a dimension.
  2. If no dimension is selected, the default value is the average of all dimensions
Click Accept to save the values.

To view the exact metric values in a call-out box, mouse over the metric graph line.

To create a highlight point, click on the metric graph line.

To simultaneously view the data for more than one VM, in the virtual appliance go to the Monitoring section.

Virtual appliance monitoring view for VM metrics