Ever wanted to be able to graphically display the esxtop statistics but always had to work with tools like performance monitor that are awesome but still a little intimidating to work with?
I had to capture some analytics from esxtop on how some hypervisors were doing on disk usage, typical commands, reads and writes. Now I did need to present the data and as always yellowbricks was helpful.
Here goes,
Run esxtop and then use the “f” key to filter out the data you may not need. Its really up to you. If you don’t filter, the end file will just be huge and if you have space to spare you should be fine. Once done, you can actually save this to a new or a default config file by the “W” key.
Once saved,
$> esxtop -b -d 2 -n 100 > esxtop.csv
Here above -b says batch mode and -d is the number of seconds to capture data and -n is number of iterations. So here this will run for 200 seconds and dump the data in esxtop.csv in the present working directory.
I also learnt that using the -a switch above will capture all data but be careful about the time of capture as it can really blow up.
Now that we have the esxtop.csv, a great tool to use is the esxplot from VMware Labs.
Simply go here and download the tool – it runs on both windows and linux. Simply run the executable in windows and then go to File –> Import –> Dataset. You can then import the csv and then the hypervisor will show up. Double click the hypervisor and choose what info that needs to be plotted using the shift key for multiple graphs.
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