I recently received a call from one of my favorite customers who was experiencing some slowness in their environment. They are running a Nutanix block that is about a year and a half old, utilizing hybrid storage. In larger environments, I would immediately open the customers vRealize Operations Manager and take a peek to see who is the causing the issue. In this case, the customer doesn’t use vRealize so that wasn’t available. I then immediately turned my attention to Nutanix Prism. For those not familiar with Prism, it is a single pane of glass to manage and monitor your Nutanix environment. You can retrieve a ton of information on each virtual machine running in the environment.
So what did I do to find the issue?
- When I logged into Prism, I immediately noticed that cluster IOPS more than tripled single the initial call into the help desk. (example of graph below)
- I then selected VM from the menu. This will bring you to the “VM Overview” page. This page gives you the following information by default. Top users VMs by IOPS, VM Alerts, Latency, Memory usage and CPU usage.
- I could immediately see that the customers backup server was the suspect in this case as it was generating a ton of disk activity. This is the information I needed to log into the VM to find out what was going on.
Customer = happy!
To show you the kind of information and graphs you get when you click on the “table” section of VM, this is a snapshot of your virtual machines.
If you want to drill down into a specific VM – click on that VM and you will see the following information.
Hope this helps you when troubleshooting “bully” VMs in the future.