Network counters at the VM level
The following screenshot shows the counters vCenter provides for the Network at a VM layer. The counters are available at each individual vNIC level and at the VM level. Most VMs will only have one vNIC so the data at VM level and vNIC level will be identical. The vNICs are named using the convention "400x". That means the first vNIC is 4000, the second vNIC is 4001, and so on.
VM Network counters
As usual, let's approach the counters starting with Contention. There is no Latency counter, so you cannot track how long it takes for a packet to reach its destination. There are, however, counters that track dropped packets. A dropped packet needs to be retransmitted and therefore increases network latency from the application's point of view. vRealize Operations provides a Latency counter, which uses packet drops as an indicator. Using a percentage is certainly easier than dealing with the raw counters in vCenter. The packet drop percentage is based on the packets...
