How to Configure Additional VM Metrics in vCloud Director

vCloud Director already for some time (since version 5.6) provides to tenants basic set of VM metrics. Until vCloud Director 9.0 they had to be retrieved with vCloud API, however now the users can easily access the metrics from the new HTML5 UI.

vCloud Director 9.0 besides adding the metric UI also simplifies the metric database backend configuration (no KairosDB needed anymore) and also provides the option to service provider to configure additional VM metrics.

Here follows the step by step description of the last point. I assume that Cassandra cluster – the VM metric database is already set up.

• First you need to find the metric names VC Performance Manager uses. This PowerCLI script exports all VM metric names.
• Now we will create text file (e.g. metrics.groovy) with the new metrics.

configuration {
metric("mem.granted.average")
metric("mem.granted.maximum")
}


The metrics in the file must not overlap with the already existing default metrics. Additional options about frequency, interval averages, etc. can be provided as well. See docs for the details.

• On a vCloud Director cell with the cell-management-tool we will import the new metrics:
  $VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool configure-metrics –metrics-config /tmp/metrics.groovy 
• Still on the cell we need to update Cassandra schema, again with the cell-management-tool (provide the correct nodes addresses, DB authentication details, port and metrics time to live in days):
  $VCLOUD_HOME/bin/cell-management-tool cassandra –configure –cluster-nodes 172.16.0.41 –username cassandra –password cassandra –port 9042 –ttl 31 –update-schema
• Restart all cells

That is all. After while we can monitor the new metrics with the UI or API.

The metric definition is stored in vCloud Director table metric_configuration.

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