Gaining insights into the details of what makes up a large and complex VMware environment can be challenging. This is especially true if gathering individual VM performance data is part of the goal.
Live Optics, a tool created by Dell Technologies, is a great way to gather performance data from a vSphere environment over time. It can run on a laptop or VM and has the ability to either take a snapshot of the environment without performance data or to run over a period from 10min to 7 days and report also on performance.
The data can be streamed continuously to a Live Optics endpoint. In this case the data gathering process can be viewed live through the Live Optics web portal. Alternatively the data can be saved locally as an encrypted SIOKIT file during the capture process and then be uploaded to the Live Optics portal once data collection is complete.
Below is a 5 min video showing the entire process of account creation, collection download and report export in Excel format for reference