High CPU on a CVM - Isolating and troubleshooting | Nutanix Community
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Let's say that you are monitoring your cluster's performance or you received alerts regarding high CPU on a CVM. 

Why high CPU utilisation on a CVM is a critical alert? 

The CVMs are one of the most important components in a Nutanix cluster. It is crucial that CVMs are healthy and perform their tasks properly as they run Nutanix software and serve all of the I/O operations to the hypervisor and all VMs running on that host.

To understand the reason behind the high utilization, begin by identifying patterns of the performance: 

  • Is the high CPU constant or periodic? 

  • How long has the high CPU been occurring? 

  • Is there a similar behaviour on other CVMs? 

Certain patterns may point towards a cause. For example, a periodic spike may be attributed to antivirus, backup or a similar scheduled task being run in the background.

To view the live CPU utilization run top on a CVM.

For historical "top" info, review the top logs based on each CVM under/home/nutanix/data/logs/sysstats/top.INFO


For more information and for troubleshooting high CPU in general check out KB-2345.

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