With Exploration Mode now encompassing both VMs and hosts, administrators can focus in on a workload performance issue and “replay” the environment to correlate events, resource utilization patterns, and environment changes in the seconds, minutes or days leading up to a problem in application performance or availability.
To view a Host with Exploration Mode, you use the new Search Virtual Machines and Hosts bar at the top of the CloudPhysics Web Console.
Once the Host has been selected you get taken to a dashboard that gives you configuration details of the Host, any changes (Power Operations, Snapshot, vMotions) that have been done against that VM in the provided date range and a performance graph that covers CPU, Memory, Network and Storage. There is also an Issues section which alerts you to any possible configuration issues or mismatch.
There is also the introduction of a Tab View which allows you to have open multiple Hosts and/or VMs to compare against…what would be nice would be the ability to overlay both Hosts and VMs to try and pinpoint events or key metrics points as they happened.
Below is a YouTube video from a recent webinar where the CloudPhysics VP Product Management Chris Schin walks through the way the platform uses Exploration Mode to identify root causes of VM Performance issues.
If you are interested in giving CloudPhysics a try, they have a free edition which you can register for and download here: CloudPhysics Free Edition