As every esx engineer knowns its important to pay close attention to the core four components in a Vmware Infrastructure 3. For the most important counters see table below,referring to online documentation on performance monitoring and analysis for more information on these counters and how to interpret them.

Subsystem
Esxtop Counter
VirtualCenter Counter

CPU
%RDY
&USED
Ready
Usage

Memory
%ACTV
SWW/s
SWR/s
Active
Swapin
Swapout

Storage
ACTV
DAVG/cmd
KAVG/cmd
Commands
deviceWriteLatency and deviceReadLatency
kernelWriteLatency and kernelReadLatency

Network
MbRX/s
MbTX/s
packetsRx
packetsTx

Table 1 [...]