As discussed earlier, vCenter does not provide information at this level. This makes monitoring difficult, as you cannot slice the data from the switch point of view. This is one major enhancement in vRealize Operations. It provides a set of counters at the Distributed Switch level and for its port groups. Putting network as a first-class object is one of the major enhancements in Versions 6.0 and 5.8.2. If you are using VMware NSX, you will see that the management pack for NSX provides even deeper visibility into the virtual network.

For Contention, vRealize Operations provides the Packet Dropped (%) metric. You will not find the Contention (%) metric. For Utilization, you use both the metric Usage Rate (KBps) and Workload (%). You need to use both due to the dynamic nature of the upper limit.

The following screenshot shows an example of visibility at the Distributed Switch level:

In addition to the preceding, vRealize Operations provides some...