In Part 2 of this series, we take a look at how to monitor the health of your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) by retrieving some of the health metrics that are exposed by the Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI).

VAMI UI Area of Focus

Regardless if you have an Embedded VCSA, External PSC or External VCSA node, there are four basic health metrics that are shown in the VAMI UI today: overall health of the system, CPU, memory and the last time the health check was performed. If you are running an Embedded VCSA or External VCSA, there is an additional health metric for the vCenter Server Database (VCDB) as shown in the screenshot below. Interestingly, while going through the health APIs, I also found a few more metrics that are currently not displayed in the VAMI UI today. These additional metrics include Swap, Storage and Software packages which can also be useful to monitor, especially on the storage front.

VAMI APIs Used

GET /appliance/system/health/system

GET /appliance/system/health/system/lastcheck

GET /appliance/system/health/load

GET /appliance/system/health/mem

GET /appliance/system/health/swap

GET /appliance/system/health/storage

GET /appliance/system/health/databasestorage

GET /appliance/system/health/softwarepackages

PowerCLI Function

Sample Output



Similiar to the output found in the VAMI UI, you now have a quick way of viewing the high level health of the VCSA which includes additional metrics not covered in the UI today. The VAMI APIs also provide more granular statistics if you wish to drill down further such as inspecting the current storage utilization for each partition/volume as an example. We will save that use case for a future blog post.