How can you effectively monitor the performance of VMs in vCenter?

Monitoring the performance of virtual machines (VMs) within vCenter is best done using performance charts and metrics. vCenter provides a robust set of built-in tools that allow administrators to view real-time data and historical performance metrics concerning CPU usage, memory consumption, disk I/O, and network activity for each VM.

These performance charts are intuitive, enabling users to visualize the health and performance trends of their virtual environment, which is crucial for identifying bottlenecks or performance issues. The ability to track performance over time helps in capacity planning and ensures the environment runs optimally.

While external monitoring applications can provide additional functionality or integrate broader monitoring across multiple systems, the native tools in vCenter are designed specifically for VMware environments and offer a level of detail that is both comprehensive and easily accessible. Manual inspections would be inefficient and impractical as they do not provide the immediate and continuous insight that performance charts and metrics deliver. VPN connections, although useful for secure remote access, do not pertain to performance monitoring directly or provide insights into VM performance.