Citrix XenServer Agent v6.2.3 TCR Reports

This blog will highlight the TCR reports just released to compliment the Agent for Citrix XenServer v6.2.3

What is TCR?

Tivoli Common Reporting is a business tool utilized by Tivoli products to show key metrics such as CPU, memory, disk usage, and network I/O for a product. For more information on what TCR is visit:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/groups/service/html/communityview?communityUuid=9caf63c9-15a1-4a03-96b3-8fc700f3a364

This blog will highlight the TCR reports just released to compliment the Agent for Citrix XenServer v6.2.3. These reports can be downloaded here:

http://www-304.ibm.com/software/brandcatalog/ismlibrary/details?catalog.label=1TW10TM9U

Why Use TCR?

Although Tivoli Monitoring Agents do a great job of representing data, they can be more powerful with a compliment like TCR. The XenServer Agent collects data and represents it in the Tivoli Enterprise Portal Desktop (TEPD) in a number of ways (i.e graphs, tables) but creating custom workspaces can become advanced. Tivoli Common Reporting is a tool a customer can use to create reports that have the same or even more capabilities than a TEPD workspace. The reports for the Agent for Citrix XenServer v6.2.3 aim to increase the power of an agent by extending its capabilities.

XenServer 6.2.3 TCR Highlights

One of the reports included in the TCR package is named “XenServer Hypervisor Heat Chart”. This report shows percentages of memory and CPU utilization in a cross-tab.The cross-tab contains colors that correspond to a number the user inputs in the prompt page. If the metric inside the cross-tab is below the threshold it will appear in that color. As the threshold statuses increase to ‘critical’, the color inside the cross-tab becomes red. In an actual environment, this report will alert a user to hypervisors that may be running critically high on memory or hypervisors that are being under-used. See Figure 1 For an example report.

Another report bundled with the TCR package is named “XenServer Top Or Bottom Workload Consumers”. This report shows the top or bottom hypervisors in terms of key metrics such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, and network I/O. One feature of this report is the top/bottom option. This allows a user to choose if they want to view the key metrics by most utilized or least utilized. Additionally, a user can choose if they want to display percentages or real numbers. For example, they can view memory used as a number (MB) or as a percentage. Another feature of this report is it allows a user to filter the number of results that are displayed. For example, they can see the top five hypervisors by cpu utilization or the bottom ten hypervisors by percentage of memory used. All the features of this report make it flexible. It is essentially over ten reports packaged into one. See figure 2 for an example report.

Reports can also be run against virtual machines. One of the reports packaged with the 6.2.3 reports is “XenServer Top N VM CPU Utilization Report”. A user may select one, many, or all of the available hypervisors. Then, a list is generated of all the virtual machines on those hypervisors. Once again, a user may select any number of those virtual machines. Next, the user must enter a number (n) of virtual machines to display. The report will run and display the number of  virtual machines that use the most CPU. The unique feature of this report is that it contains a “drill-through”. A drill-through is a relationship between two reports. It runs another report based off of information passed from the current report. The drill-through for this report occurs when a user clicks on a virtual machine name. Another packaged report “XenServer Virtual Machine Daily CPU Trend” will then be run for the virtual machine that was clicked. This allows a customer to really scope in on a virtual machine’s CPU utilization. This dynamic allows a user the option to view more general trends of a virtual machine or focus on one week or even one day.

All of these reports contain prompt pages where a user can specify parameters to run the report. All of the reports contain some of the same parameters. One is date range, a user can run the report for a number of date ranges including today, yesterday, last week, last month, or even a specified date range, down to the hour.

The Future

Currently, reports are being developed for the Citrix XenServer 7.1 agent. Some features added to these reports:

• Pool centered reports
• Running reports for only peak hours
• More advanced filtering
• What-If Analysis reporting
• Workload Forecasting