libvirt

The open source libvirt project has created a common set of tools for managing virtualization resources on different virtualization platforms (currently Xen, QEMU, KVM, LXC, OpenVZ, User Mode Linux, VirtualBox and VMware ESX and GSX). An important element of libvirt is the definition of a standard set of metrics for monitoring performance of virtualization domains (virtual machines).

The sFlow standard includes the libvirt performance metrics (see sFlow Host Structures), providing consistency between different virtualization platforms and between sFlow and libvirt based performance monitoring systems.

The benefit of using sFlow for virtual machine performance monitoring is the improved scalability (see Cloud-scale performance monitoring) and the integration of virtualization metrics with network and system performance monitoring (see Management silos).