VMWare Monitoring

You can monitor the following Objects of the host and individual virtual machines

1. CPU
2. Datastore
3. Memory
4. Network
5. Power
6. Storage Adaptor
7. Storage Path
8. System

Under the Performance Tab, you will see graphs of the above objects for Host or Virtual Machine using vCenter they can be archived in an SQL database. Depending upon the database SQL Express has a 4GB limit, but if using SQL full version, you can store performance data since starting the server.

You may want to consider looking at Veeam Monitor for free, that can monitor and store data for ESX.

Veeam Monitor for free


If you want a quick tool, to help you with wanting to know all the individual elements, then I would suggest using Veeam Monitor Free Edition

Veeam Monitor leverages Veeam Business View™ to enable performance monitoring, alerting and reporting for virtual machine groups based on criteria such as business unit, department, location, purpose, service-level agreement or any other criteria you define. This ability to perform business-centric monitoring helps to identify the business impact of a virtual infrastructure’s performance and respond accordingly. It also allows you to configure flexible alerts based on known server type characteristics and the potential business impact of an outage for more granular service-level management. You can also create targeted reports showing only the data relevant to specific business units, departments or types of server.
More features

Source
http://www.veeam.com/esxi-monitoring-free.html.

Great, thanks; is it possible to store the information for a period over time?

Yes, we have performance data stored for the many years!

Depends on the size of your SQL database.

do you have information how to configure this and extract it?  I want to set this up to store for  a few months.  Also, where do you read it?

or I mean can you export it to Excel?

Performance Information is stored in an SQL database if using VMware vCenter or Veeam Monitor for free.

You can export from the current Performance charts, by Selecting Save Chart, and Select Microsoft Office Excel Workbook (*.xls)

Do you have vCenter Server?

yes, I see the monitoring, how do I configure and can I export data for ranges?

If you have vCenter Server which stores the data you can change a custom date range, and select Save Chart to Excel.

If you only have ESX server, only the last hour of data is available, you would need to use vCenter or third party product to store the data.

In vCenter click Chart Options, select a date range, Past day, week, month, year or custom range.

Click Save chart to Export as Excel

Thanks!  One last question, for monitoring more so performance of vm's what is considered a best practice monitoring variables?  Is using the built-in vmware variables enough or also adding in something like veam?

This worked great, thanks!!