The XenServer sensor is very rough, it cannot for example calculate totals or be used in reports.

For network traffic there are to data channels requested network send and network received. The numbers are very odd, can Paessler confirm what this number are? In what scaled are they measured, Kilobits, Kilobytes?

All what it says next to each channel is kBps but I want to confirm from Paessler which speed or volume unit is used here because they have decimals which don't make sense.

Im waiting 5 years now for an official way to measure traffic from XenServer DomU machines and the product still doesn't support it where every other traffic tool and monitoring in the market already supports it out of the box.

At least please explain what the data means so it can be exported and use in an external tool. There are no references in the manual, neither in the FAQ or support pages or any kind of information what so ever about this sensor.

Article Comments

Hello,

PRTG utilizes XenServer RRDs to retrieve Performance Data, as descibed in:

http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/Using+XenServer+RRDs


Jan, 2012 - Permalink

The document above by Torsten still does not mention the UNIT OF MEASUREMENT for network traffic.


Jan, 2013 - Permalink

Because there is no unit, you need to specify it like: xe vif-param-get uuid=VIFUUID param-name=io_read_kbs

Or xe vif-param-get uuid=VIFUUID param-name=io_write_kbs

PRTG is just getting the raw data which is more or less useless since it changes the unit based on speed to the best matching result. Its not a constant fixed unit.

There is a solution which I use, but its messy and complicated, it works, but it cannot scale, as it requires PRTG to be restarted all the time to apply changes to the XML config file.


Jan, 2013 - Permalink

What Volker wrote is basically correct, which is why as of PRTG 12 the Xen VM-Sensors do not show Traffic/Network channels anymore.


Jan, 2013 - Permalink