Each collection interval has a default collection level that determines the amount of data gathered and which counters are available for display in the charts. Collection levels are also referred to as statistics levels.

Table 1. Statistics Levels
Level Metrics Best Practice
Level 1
  • Cluster Services (VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler) – all metrics
  • CPU – cpuentitlement, totalmhz, usage (average), usagemhz
  • Disk – capacity, maxTotalLatency, provisioned, unshared, usage (average), used
  • Memory – consumed, mementitlement, overhead, swapinRate, swapoutRate, swapused, totalmb, usage (average), vmmemctl (balloon)
  • Network – usage (average), IPv6
  • System – heartbeat, uptime
  • Virtual Machine Operations – numChangeDS, numChangeHost, numChangeHostDS

Use for long-term performance monitoring when device statistics are not required.

Level 1 is the default Collection Level for all Collection Intervals.

Level 2
  • Level 1 metrics
  • CPU – idle, reservedCapacity
  • Disk – All metrics, excluding numberRead and numberWrite.
  • Memory – All metrics, excluding memUsed and maximum and minimum rollup values.
  • Virtual Machine Operations – All metrics
Use for long-term performance monitoring when device statistics are not required but you want to monitor more than the basic statistics.
Level 3
  • Level 1 and Level 2 metrics
  • Metrics for all counters, excluding minimum and maximum rollup values.
  • Device metrics

Use for short-term performance monitoring after encountering problems or when device statistics are required.

Because of the large quantity of troubleshooting data retrieved and recorded, use level 3 for the shortest time period (Day or Week collection interval).

Level 4 All metrics supported by the vCenter Server, including minimum and maximum rollup values.

Use for short-term performance monitoring after encountering problems or when device statistics are required.

Because of the large quantity of troubleshooting data retrieved and recorded, use level 4 for the shortest amount of time.

Note: When you increase the collection level, the storage and system requirements might change. You might need to allocate more system resources to avoid a decrease in the performance.