Monitor and analyze traffic to and from protected virtual machines with Flow Monitoring

 
Flow monitoring is a network traffic analysis service that shows the traffic flow to and from virtual machines. To enable and analyze traffic, you will want to follow the instructions below.
 

Enable Flow Monitoring

 
Step 1. Log into the vSphere Web Client and Navigate to Networking & Security -> Flow Monitoring -> Configuration then click the Enable button by Global Flow Collection Status
 

 
You can see the service enabled here. You will need to wait at least 5 minutes before any graphing will show on the Dashboard page
 

 
Note: You can also specify exclusion Settings on Blocked Flows, Layer 2 Flows, Source, Destination, Destination Ports, or Service If you want to add exclusions, just click in the appropriate Filter box.
 

 
Step 2. Click on the Dashboard tab and view Top Flows, Top Destinations, and Top Sources
 

 

 

 
Step 3. If you want to change the Date Range of the flow monitoring charts, click the Calendar Icon on the top right.
 

 
Step 4. Specify the Time Interval then click OK
 

 
Step 5. Click the Details by Service Tab here you can view the statistics for Allowed Flows and Blocked Flows based on Type, Service, Bytes, and Sessions
 

 
Step 6. Click on the Live Flow tab. Here you can watch the TCP and UDP connections to a specific vNIC.
 

 
Step 7. Select the vNIC then hit OK
 

 
Step 8. Click Start to begin the Live Flow analysis.

 
Step 9. Click Stop to end the Live Flow analysis.
 
This tool can be very powerful for troubleshooting Virtual Machine traffic issues. For more information, please see VMware’s Documentation on Flow Monitoring.