Foglight for VMware 5.8 - User and Reference Guide

Planning for virtual machine migrations

The VMware Modeler dashboard provides a mechanism you can use to view the impact that migrating a virtual machine will have on a target ESX Host. This dashboard takes up the entire display area of the Foglight for VMware browser interface. It can be accessed in two different ways:

The VMware Modeler dashboard provides four graphs that show current and projected numbers, for CPU and memory utilization and network and disk activity, on the target ESX Host over the time range specified in the VMware Explorer dashboard.

The blue area on the graphs represents current consumption or activity on the target ESX Host. The orange area specifies projected worst case consumption or activity. The red dotted line specifies the target ESX Host capacity with respect to the corresponding metric. For reference information about the data appearing on this dashboard, see VMware Modeler views .

When using the VMware Modeler dashboard, you should extend the time range in order to better assess the long term impact of the potential migration. For specific information about adjusting dashboard time ranges, refer to the Foglight for VMware User Guide.

Creating OS mapping rules

OS mapping involves associating various versions and editions of a particular operating system with a common OS name. You configure OS mapping rules using the Administration tab on the VMware Environment dashboard. This helps Foglight for VMware map the OS names reported by Foglight for VMware to those reported by physical OS monitoring, so that you can view all Windows machines, all Linux machines, and so on.

For reference information about this view, see OS Mapping view .

Reviewing object instances and limits

Foglight collects data from monitored environments and creates a data model in real-time. The resulting topology model consists of nodes where each node is an object instance of a particular object type. Each type of monitoring environment can have a unique set of object types. Foglight for VMware includes a set of topology object types and their definitions. When Foglight collects data from your VMware environment, it builds the topology model that consists of the instances of the object types defined by Foglight for VMware. By default, a monitored environment can result in up to 50,000 object instances being created by a single object type. This value is controlled by the foglight.limit.instances registry variable.

Registry variables have a global default value and type-specific scoped values. This means that different object types can have different instance limits.

Explore the Instances and Limits view to see the existing VMware object types. To access this view, on the VMware Environment dashboard, open the Administration tab, and click Review Instances and Limits.

The Instances and Limits view displays the list of the existing VMware object types, and for each type it shows the type name, instance limit, instance count, instance limit utilization, and the current status given as a highest severity level associated with an instance of that type. This information can give you insight into the size of your database and whether additional adjustments are required to improve your system performance. For example, if an object type results in a high number of object instances, this may result in performance bottlenecks. To prevent them, check if any of these are updated recently and, if not, delete them from the database.

To view the list of existing registry variables or to edit them, click Edit Registry Variable in the top-left corner. For complete information about registry variables, see the Administration and Configuration Help.

For reference information about this view, see Instances and Limits view .

Configure Metrics Collection

VMware agent has collect total 99 metrics from vCenter, but some metrics are not used to VMware dashboard and relate products (Capacity Director, Optimizer and so on), so the user can disable the collection of these metrics at this view.

For reference information about this view, see Metrics Collection Management View .

To configure the metrics collection:

NOTE: User can also select/deselect the Collecting checkbox, but we wouldn’t recommend it because some metrics have been used for conversion of other metrics.