Monitoring VMs on Nutanix AHV

Previously, we elaborately discussed about the wide variety of external metrics that provides an “external” view of the different VM guests - and these metrics are based on what the Nutanix AHV host is viewing about the performance of the individual guests. However, in some environments, administrators may not be inclined to identify the external metrics, and they may still want to monitor the internal health indicators. For instance, suppose one of the disk partitions of the guest operating system has reached capacity. This information cannot be gleaned from host operating system. Likewise, bottlenecks such as a longer process run queue or a higher disk queue length are more visible using an internal monitor. Internal monitoring (from within the guest operating system) also provides details about the resource utilization of different application(s) or processes.

In order to enable administrators to collect such internal metrics in a non-intrusive manner, eG Enterprise offers the VMs on Nutanix AHV model. This model provide an “internal” view of the workings of each of the guests - these tests send probes into each of the guest operating systems to analyze how well each guest utilizes the resources that are allocated to it, and how well it handles user sessions, TCP traffic, and network loading. To use this model, only a single eG external agent is required; this agent sits on a remote host and determines the required metrics from the target VMs on Nutanix AHV.

Figure 1 : Layer model of the VMs on Nutanix AHV

The tests associated with the Inside View of Desktops Layer of this model has already been explained in the previous sections.