The Live! Heavy Hitters dashboard helps you analyze the misuse of the shared infrastructure. This dashboard displays details of VMs misusing shared infrastructure and if that has caused performance problems to the other VMs. The shared infrastructure includes risks. The cause for excessive load might be attacks, for example, the denial of service, process runaway, or a mass activation of agents. The most demanding VM is the largest. If a handful of VMs is dominating the shared infrastructure, their collective size is displayed on the dashboard.
Design Considerations
See the Performance Dashboards page for common design considerations among all the dashboards for performance management.
In a shared environment, it is possible to have a victim-villain problem. In the heat map, the villain VM is the one with the largest box size, while the victim VM is the one with the red box. If a handful of VMs is dominating the shared infrastructure, their collective size will be highly visible on the dashboard.
How to Use the Dashboard
- The heat maps, Disk IOPS, Disk Throughput, Network Throughput, and CPU Demand displays the four different loads that can be excessive. The heat maps display the relative value and not the absolute value. A VM does not generate a high load in the absolute term just because it has a large configuration.
- Each heat map has its color threshold, reflecting the nature of the contention metrics used in each of them.
- For NOC Operator, drill-down by selecting one of the VMs on the heat map. All the four line charts are automatically displayed, enabling you to get a complete picture of the selected VM.
Points to Note
- Memory is not displayed as it is a form of storage. The memory counters are space utilization and not speed. Think of disk space instead of IOPS. It can cause a capacity problem on the shared ESXi host, but not performance problems to other VMs.
- In a large environment, it might be difficult to view a small victim VM. Consider having multiple dashboards and use them interchangeably.
