The Host sFlow agent now supports Windows performance monitoring (in addition to Linux): http://host-sflow.sourceforge.net/
Metrics (based on libvirt) have been defined for reporting virtual machine performance. A new draft of the Host sFlow specification contains the new structures: http://www.sflow.org/sflow_host-draft2.txt The Host sFlow agent can export the virtual machine metrics on Xen/XenServer platforms. Installing the recently released Open vSwitch 1.0.0 virtual switch along with Host sFlow on XenServer gives complete visibility into physical and virtual network and system performance and makes a good platform to try out the technology. For directions on configuring sFlow on the Open vSwitch see: http://blog.sflow.com/2010/05/configuring-open-vswitch.html Peter On Apr 3, 2010, at 12:10 PM, Peter Phaal wrote: > Current trends toward virtualization and convergence tightly link networking > and system performance and blur the line between the network and the servers. > For example, virtualization places switching and routing functions on > servers. Monitoring the network in this environment requires that the servers > are also monitored. Similarly anyone concerned with application and server > performance must now also be concerned about network performance since > application features (such as virtual machine migration) can significantly > affect and be affected by network performance. > > Currently, performance monitoring of servers and applications is highly > fragmented. Each server vendor, operating system vendor and application > developer creates agents and software for performance monitoring, none of > which interoperate. Monitoring performance of a server might require the same > (or similar but incompatible metrics) be monitored more than once since each > management application requires its own agent. In addition, there may be > other agents monitoring different hardware and software elements within the > server. > > The development of performance and application monitoring in sFlow requires > progress on two parallel tracks: > 1. specifying the additional structures to be used when exporting performance > metrics in sFlow > 2. implementing sFlow agents that export the metrics in order to allow > application developers and system administrators to deploy agents and gain > experience. > > The draft Host sFlow specification describes some basic sFlow structures for > monitoring host performance and lays a foundation for future work to extend > sFlow to monitor virtual machines and application services (e.g. Xen, > Hyper-V, VMware, HTTP, NFS, memcached, Hadoop etc): > http://www.sflow.org/sflow_host-draft1.txt > > The Host sFlow sourceforge project is building an open source Host sFlow > agent that can easily be ported to a wide variety of operating systems: > http://host-sflow.sourceforge.net/ > > Initial prototypes of the Host sFlow agent have been running on over 1000 > Windows and Linux servers. > > For server and application management, the combination of sFlow in the top of > rack switch and Host sFlow is particularly compelling. Servers maintain many > useful performance counters, but don't typically have hardware support for > packet sampling so have a very limited view their network I/O. The top of > rack switch has hardware packet sampling support and sees all the traffic in > and out of the servers. Host sFlow exports the counters that are currently > stranded on the server, allowing a performance management system to put > together the network and system performance for each server by combining data > from the switch and the servers.
