While going through the PowerCLI 6.5.1 release notes last week, in addition to the new Get-VsanView cmdlet which exposes the complete vSAN Management API through PowerCLI, I had learned that we had also released a new Get-VsanStat cmdlet. This new cmdlet allows customers to easily retrieve the various vSAN Performance Metrics provided by the vSAN Performance Service.
The really nice thing about vSAN Performance Service is that all vSAN stats are now available directly in the vSphere Web Client, where as before, this information was only available as part of the vSAN Observer which was a completely different interface. The other huge benefit to using the vSAN Performance Service is that it also stores the historical stats compared to the vSAN Observer which was primarily used for real time troubleshooting. As of vSAN 6.6, the vSAN Observer has been deprecated and will only be used by GSS in limited scenarios, everything you were able to do with the vSAN Observer is now possible with the vSAN Performance Service.
While trying out the new Get-VsanStat cmdlet, I had found it to be quite difficult to easily map the vSAN metrics I saw in the UI to the specific PowerCLI query required to extract that information. The documentation was also quite light and only included a single sample and although some of the metrics could easily be deduced, there were many others that I was just unsure of. I had also tried using the vSAN Management API directly, thinking that I might have more luck but it was also challenging to use for other reasons and I still ran into the same problem which was how do I easily map what I saw from the UI down to the API or even associating that back to PowerCLI.
After spending a few days with BOTH PowerCLI and the vSAN Management API and with a bit of frustration, I think I have finally figured out how to map what I saw from the UI back to the both CLI and API. This was not an easy task as and I had to cross-reference multiple datasources to build up this mapping and I thought I would put together a reference which outlines this mapping so that others would have to go through the same pain. IMHO, this should be a pretty straight forward task. In addition, I have also provided a PowerCLI sample for each of the metric types as well as the associated vSAN Management API mapping as those differ in name as well. This hopefully should make it easy for anyone to start using either of these interfaces for collecting vSAN metrics from an Automation standpoint. As part of this exercise, I also ran into a variety of bugs which I have already filed internally and all this information has been feedback to Engineering teams to hopefully improve both our CLI and API in future updates.
