If you look at the ESXi and VM metric groups for storage in the vCenter performance chart, it is not clear how they relate to one another at first glance. You have storage network, storage adapter, storage path, datastore, and disk metric groups that you need to check. How do they impact on one another?

I have created the following diagram to explain the relationship. The beige boxes are what you are likely to be familiar with. You have your ESXi host, and it can have NFS Datastore, VMFS Datastore, or RDM objects. The blue colored boxes represent the metric groups.

From ESXi to disk

NFS and VMFS datastores differ drastically in terms of counters, as NFS is file-based while VMFS is block-based. For NFS, it uses the vmnic, and so the adapter type (FC, FCoE, or iSCSI) is not applicable. Multipathing is handled by the network, so you don't see it in the storage layer. For VMFS or RDM, you have more detailed visibility of the storage. To start off, each ESXi adapter is visible and you can...