Mastering VMware vSphere™ 4

12.3. Working with Performance Graphs

Alarms are a great tool for alerting administrators of specific conditions or events, but alarms don't provide the detailed information that administrators sometimes need to have. This is where vCenter Server's performance graphs come in. vCenter Server has many new and updated features for creating and analyzing graphs. Without these graphs, analyzing the performance of a virtual machine would be nearly impossible. Installing agents inside a virtual machine will not provide accurate details about the server's behavior or resource consumption. The reason for this is elementary: a virtual machine is configured only with virtual devices. Only the VMkernel knows the exact amount of resource consumption for ...