CPU counters at the VM level

The following screenshot shows the VM CPU counters in vCenter 6.0, taken from the C# client:

VM CPU counters

The Collection Level column does not apply to vRealize Operations. Changing Collection Level does not impact which counters get collected by vRealize Operations. It collects all counters from vCenter using its own filter, which you can customize.

In vCenter, there are 17 counters available at the VM level, and 12 of them are available at the virtual core level too. This means that a VM with two vCPUs (or two virtual cores) will have 40 counters (2 x 12 + 16). A vSphere environment with 1,000 VMs with two vCPUs as the average VM size will have 40,000 counters!

In vCenter, you can only look at two types of counters at the same time. Because VMs can impact each other's performance, you need a management tool that can cut across all of these 40 counters across many VMs in all vCenter Servers. vRealize Operations allows you to slice and dice all of these...