ESXi hosts with sustained high swapping

You might need to monitor ESXi hosts for sustained high swapping when doing the following:

• Monitoring VMware virtual machine performance

Prerequisites 

In order to execute this procedure in your environment, the following data, services, or apps are required:

• Virtualization data
• Operating system event data
• Splunk Add-on for VMware

Example

When an ESXi host can't reclaim necessary memory through ballooning, the host begins to swap memory to disk. Memory swapping on the host is a strong indication that the host is over provisioned and experiencing significant memory pressure. The latency introduced by the swapping has a noticeable performance impact on the virtual machines running on the host. You want to monitor and investigate hosts with high memory swapping.

NOTE: To optimize the search shown below, you should specify an index and a time range.

1. Run the following search: 

sourcetype="vmware:perf:mem" source="VMPerf:HostSystem" 
|stats max(p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes) AS max_p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes by moid
|eval is_high_swapping = if(max_p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes > 5000, 1, 0)
|eventstats mean(max_p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes) AS mean_host_population stdev(max_p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes) AS stdev_host_population
|eval stdev_from_host_population = (max_p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes - mean_host_population) / stdev_host_population
|sort - stdev_from_host_population
|table moid max_p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes is_high_swapping mean_host_population stdev_host_population stdev_from_host_population mean_host_population stdev_host_population |rename max_p_average_mem_llSwapUsed_kiloBytes AS "Avg Mem swapped (KB)" is_high_swapping AS Swapping mean_host_population AS "Mean Host Pop." stdev_host_population AS "Stdev of Host Pop." stdev_from_host_population AS "Stdev Across Host Pop"

Search explanation

The table provides an explanation of what each part of this search achieves. You can adjust this query based on the specifics of your environment.

Result

Sample results for this search are shown in the table below. None of the hosts have crossed the swapping threshold set in the search. You can see the average KB of memory swapped and which hosts are under some memory pressure and which are less so. From that information, you can determine if and where to move load from and to in order to better balance load.