Use alarms for proactive monitoring. vCenter Server offers extensive alarms for alerting vSphere administrators to excessive resource consumption or potentially negative events. You can create alarms on virtually any type of object found within vCenter Server, including datacenters, clusters, ESXi hosts, and VMs. Alarms can monitor for resource consumption or for the occurrence of specific events. Alarms can also trigger actions, such as running a script, migrating a VM, or sending a notification email.

Work with performance graphs. vCenter Server's detailed performance graphs are the key to unlocking the information necessary to determine why an ESXi host or VM is performing poorly. The performance graphs expose a large number of performance counters across a variety of resource types, and vCenter Server offers functionality to save customized chart settings, export performance graphs as graphic figures or Excel workbooks, or view performance graphs in a separate window.