Have you ever gazed longingly into the eyes of vCenter 4 Performance Charts and thought to yourself “What the hell does that Counter mean??”.

Since the version 4 upgrade, vCenter now has an even larger amount of Performance Counters for you to use at your disposal. But what do they all mean?

After digging around on the net I found this Document written by Scott Drummonds on the VMTN Communities Forum. Personally i still don’t think that some of the Descriptions that are given in this document are all that straight forward and easy to understand exactly what the counter is displaying.

Then I noticed this little section when removing a few unwanted counters from my Chart.

As you can see towards the bottom of the screen capture, there is a little section titled “Counter Description”. This gives a simple, plain English description of the Counter you have highlight in the Counters area above.

So next time you scratch your head and wonder what a certain counter means,  quickly enter “Chart Options” and you will be enlightened.

Update: After doing some searching i came across this VMware Developer Reference Guide to Memory Counters