Use the VMware category to monitor changes to the memory of a virtualized system on a VMware host, and its CPU ready time. Out of the box the SysTrack Agent will monitor more than 300 software and hardware inventory items in your environment. With the addition of VMware and a virtualized environment however, there will be additional values available within the virtual systems that need to be tracked.
The VMware category is on the Alarms tab of a role (Configure > System Configuration > Roles). To turn these alarms on and change their limits, times, and profiles, see Configure Alarms in a Role.
In the example alarm configuration called out below, if Memory Ballooned is 1 MB or more for 300 seconds a Yellow level alarm is triggered. If Memory Ballooned is 1 MB or more for 600 seconds a Red level alarm is triggered.
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VMware Alarms and Defaults
The VMware category has these alarms. The Default column shows the factory values. A role can change them.
Alarm | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
Memory Active (MB) | Monitors the amount of guest physical memory (in megabytes) that the virtual machine (VM) actively uses, as estimated by the VMkernel from recently used memory pages. | Off. Yellow 2048 for 30 s, Red 2048 for 60 s. |
Memory Ballooned (MB) | Monitors the amount of guest physical memory (in megabytes) reclaimed from the virtual machine (VM) by the balloon driver. | Off. Yellow 1 for 300 s, Red 1 for 600 s. |
Memory Mapped (MB) | Monitors the amount of virtual machine (VM) "physical" memory (in megabytes) that is mapped to machine memory. Mapped memory includes shared memory amount, but does not include memory overhead. | Off. Yellow 896 for 600 s, Red 896 for 1200 s. |
Memory Overhead (MB) | Monitors the amount of machine memory (in megabytes) allocated to a virtual machine (VM) beyond its reserved amount. | Off. Yellow 64 for 300 s, Red 128 for 300 s. |
Memory Shared (MB) | Monitors the amount of guest "physical" memory shared (in megabytes) with other virtual machines (through transparent page sharing in the VMkernel, a RAM deduplication technique). | Off. Yellow 2048 for 300 s, Red 2048 for 600 s. |
Memory Shared Saved (MB) | Monitors the amount of total machine memory saved (in megabytes) due to memory sharing between VMs on a common host. | Off. Yellow 2048 for 300 s, Red 2048 for 600 s. |
Memory Swapped (MB) | Monitors the amount of guest physical memory swapped out to the swap file of the virtual machine by the VMkernel (in megabytes). Swapped memory stays on disk until the virtual machine needs it. This statistic refers to VMkernel swapping and not to guest OS swapping. | Off. Yellow 32 for 60 s, Red 32 for 120 s. |
Memory Target Size (MB) | Monitors the amount of balloon target memory (in megabytes) estimated by the VMkernel. This is the desired amount of virtual machine balloon memory. If the balloon target amount is greater than the balloon amount, the VMkernel inflates the balloon amount, which reclaims more virtual machine memory. If the balloon target amount is less than the balloon amount, the VMkernel deflates the balloon, which allows the virtual machine to reallocate memory when needed. | Off. Yellow 2000 for 120 s, Red 4000 for 240 s. |
Percent Ready Time | Monitors the percentage of time that the virtual machine was ready, but could not get scheduled to run on the physical CPU. CPU ready time is dependent on the number of virtual machines on the host and their CPU loads. | Off. Yellow 5 % for 120 s, Red 10 % for 240 s. |