As usual, when I find myself having to perform a manual task more than once, I come up with some kind of automation that makes it less time-consuming in the future. Today I’m going to tell you about a small tool I’m developing, in PowerShell as always, to run Nutanix Collector extractions and compare them with each other.
Nutanix Collector is a really useful tool provided by Nutanix, designed to collect (hence the name) statistics and information from virtual environments (not just Nutanix ones), with a view to helping size those environments as accurately as possible, or ahead of a migration from other environments to Nutanix. The extractions contain performance data (and more) covering the last week of the environment’s usage.
You get the most out of the tool by uploading these extractions to the dedicated Nutanix portal (https://collector.nutanix.com/), which gives you access to more detailed charts and statistics.
My tool calls the Nutanix Collector executables to run simplified extractions of Nutanix environments and then reads the nutanix.db files they contain.
In my case, the goal of the extractions was to generate PDF reports to be archived and delivered to the end customer every week.
So I started working on the tool to meet this goal, reading the data from the Nutanix Collector extractions and using it to generate the PDF the customer had asked for.
Later on, I thought it could be useful to allow loading several weekly extractions and to generate charts that put them in sequence, so that with just a few clicks you can see how the load evolves over time.
Obviously the tool isn’t meant to replace the ones provided by the vendor (who better than them to develop tools for their own environment??), but it can help Nutanix administrators get an immediate view of some important metrics.
Right now the tool lets you view the load data of the cluster and of individual virtual machines, but I have some ideas in mind that I’ll try to “bring to life” over the next few months.
I’ve released a first version of the tool, which you can download from my GitHub space: https://github.com/balduz84/NX-Monitor