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How to configure the Virtual SAN observer for monitoring/troubleshooting

Duncan Epping · Oct 21, 2013 ·

There have been various blog posts on the topic of configuring the Virtual SAN observer on both Windows and Linux by Rawlinson Rivera and Erik Bussink. I like to keep things in a single location and document them for my own use so I figured I would do a write-up for yellow-bricks.com. First of all, what is the Virtual SAN / VSAN observer? One of our engineers (Christian Dickmann) published an internal blog on this topic and I believe it explains what it is / what it does best:

You will also find VSAN datastore as well as VM level performance statistics in the vSphere Web Client. If however you are the kind of guy who wants to really drill down on your VSAN performance in-depth, down to the physical disk layers, understand cache hit rates, reasons for observed latencies, etc. then the vSphere Web Client won’t satisfy your thirst in vSphere 5.5. That’s where the VSAN observer comes in.

So how do I enable it? Well I am a big fan of the vCenter Server Appliance so that will be my focus. Just a couple of short steps to get this up and running luckily:

  • Open an ssh session to your vCenter Server Appliance:
    • ssh [email protected]<name or ip of your vcva>
  • Open rvc using your root account and the vCenter name, in my case:
    • rvc [email protected]
  • Now do a “cd” in to your vCenter object (you can do an “ls” so see what the names are of your objects on any level), and if you do tab it will be completed with your datacenter object:
    • cd localhost/Datacenter/
  • Now do a “cd” again, the first object is “computers” and the second is your “cluster”, in my case that looks as follows:
    • cd computers/VSANCluster/
  • Now you can start the VSAN observer using the following command:
    • vsan.observer . –run-webserver –force
  • Now you can see the observer querying stats every 60 seconds, and as mentioned you can stop this by doing a <Ctrl>+<C>

Fairly straight forward right? You can now go to the observer console using:

  • http://<vcenter name or ip>:8010
    The below is what it should look like (Thanks Rawlinson for the nice screenshot)

Now one thing that is important to realize is that everything is kept in memory until you stop the VSAN observer… So it will take up GBs after a couple of hours. This tool is intended for short term monitoring and troubleshooting. Now there are  some other commands in RVC that might be useful. One of the commands I found useful was “vsan.resync_dashboard”. Basically it shows you what is happening in terms of mirror sync’ing. If you fail a host, you should see the sync happening here…

I also found “vsan.vm_object_info” very useful and interesting as it allows you to see the state of your objects. And for the geeks who do not prefer to see the pretty graphs the observer shows, take a look at “vsan.vm_perf_stats”.

Related

Software Defined, Storage, vSAN 5.5, virtual san, VMware, vsan, vSphere

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Comments

  1. Matt Mabis says

    22 October, 2013 at 02:13

    Hey Duncan,

    I tried doing line #2 rvc [email protected] and it kept asking for a password that didnt work as root… when i did [email protected] with my [email protected] password that did work, just wondering if that was a mistake…

    • Matt Mabis says

      22 October, 2013 at 02:19

      Hey Duncan,

      Also on the command vsan.observer . –run-webserver –force it looks like the double dashes got combined as 1 dash
      vsan.observer . –run-webserver –force

    • Duncan says

      22 October, 2013 at 21:13

      I described the vCenter Appliance workflow 🙂

  2. Matt Mancini says

    17 September, 2014 at 07:25

    Duncan, nice write up! I used your blog plus our VMware KB to spin Observer up in my home lab as I’ll be showing it off at the next Phoenix VMUG. For those of you who want some more screenshots I have them here > http://vmexplorer.com/2014/09/16/vsan-setting-up-vsan-observer-in-my-home-lab/

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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