Last week I released a post on configuring Cassandra for vCloud Director 9.0 metrics. As a refresher, one of the cool features released in vCloud Director SP 5.6.x was the ability to expose VM metrics that service providers could expose to their clients via a set of API calls. With the release of vCloud Director 9.0, the metrics can now be viewed from the new HTML5 tenant UI, meaning that all service providers should be able to offer this to their customers.

With the Cassandra configuration out of the way, the next step is to use the Cell Management Tool to tell the vCD cells to push the VM Metric data. Before this, if you log into the HTML5 UI you will notice no menu for Monitoring…this only gets enabled once the metrics have have been enabled by the tool.

The command has changed from previous versions in line with removing the dependancy on the KairosDB and we are now calling a cassandra argument that has the following options:

Those familiar with the previous command to configure the metrics will see a lot more options that specify the Cassandra nodes, the original command to configure the schema, the username and password to connect to the Cassandra database with and the ttl for the data, meaning that if you wanted you could keep more than two weeks of data.

If you tail the Cassandra system.log while the process is happening you will see a bunch of tables being created and populated with the initial data.

With the done, if you go into the new HTML5 Tenant UI and go to the Virtual Machine view you should now see a Monitoring Chart drop down in the menu in the main window. From here you can choose any of the available metrics across a half hour, hour, day and week timescale.

API Calls to Retrieve Current and Historical Metrics:

If you still want to go old school the following API Calls are used to gather current and historical VM metrics for vCD VMs. The Machine ID required used the VM GUID as seen in vCenter. The ID can be sourced from the VM Name. The vCD Machine ID shown below in the brackets is what you are after.