---
title: "Monitoring"
description: "Monitor your VMs on Edge Network with built-in metrics. Track CPU, memory, disk and network performance in real time and over 30 days of history."
url: "https://edge.network/docs/compute/monitoring"
section: "Compute"
---

# Monitoring

Track your VM's performance with built-in metrics and graphs.

## Overview

Edge Network provides built-in monitoring for all VMs at no additional cost. View real-time and historical metrics for CPU, memory, disk and network to understand your VM's performance.

## Accessing metrics

View your VM's metrics from the **Metrics** tab in the VM dashboard.

1. Navigate to your VM in the console.
2. Click the **Metrics** tab.
3. Select a time range (1 hour, 6 hours, 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days).

![Metrics dashboard with graphs](/media/docs/control-vm-metrics.svg)

## CPU metrics

Monitor CPU utilisation to understand your VM's processing load.

### CPU usage (%)

The percentage of CPU capacity being used, averaged across all vCPUs.

- **0–60%:** normal operation
- **60–85%:** increased load, monitor closely
- **85–100%:** high load, consider upgrading

> [!TIP]
> If CPU usage is consistently above 80%, consider adding more vCPUs or optimising your application.

## Memory metrics

Track RAM usage to ensure your applications have enough memory.

### Memory usage

- **Used:** RAM actively in use by processes
- **Cached:** RAM used for disk caching (can be freed)
- **Available:** RAM available for new processes
- **Total:** total RAM allocated to your VM

> [!WARNING]
> If available memory drops near zero, your VM may start using swap and performance will degrade significantly.

## Disk metrics

Monitor disk usage and I/O performance.

- **Disk usage:** percentage of disk space used. Keep it below 90% to avoid performance issues.
- **Disk I/O (read/write):** data transfer rate to and from disk, measured in MB/s or IOPS.
- **Disk latency:** time for disk operations to complete. Lower is better (<10ms is excellent).

> [!CAUTION]
> If disk usage reaches 100%, your applications will fail to write data and may crash. Set up alerts before this happens.

## Network metrics

Track network traffic to and from your VM.

- **Network in:** data received by your VM (inbound traffic), measured in Mbps.
- **Network out:** data sent from your VM (outbound traffic), measured in Mbps.
- **Packets:** number of network packets transmitted and received.

## Time ranges

Select different time ranges to view historical data:

| Range | Resolution | Use case |
|---|---|---|
| 1 hour | 1 minute | Real-time debugging |
| 6 hours | 5 minutes | Recent activity |
| 24 hours | 15 minutes | Daily patterns |
| 7 days | 1 hour | Weekly trends |
| 30 days | 4 hours | Monthly overview |

## Quick stats

The VM **Overview** page shows current resource usage at a glance.

![VM Overview page showing IP address](/media/docs/control-vm-overview.svg)

These metrics update automatically and show your VM's current state.

## Monitoring best practices

- **Check metrics regularly:** review your metrics at least weekly to catch trends before they become problems.
- **Understand your baseline:** know what "normal" looks like for your application so you can spot anomalies.
- **Scale before you need to:** if resources are consistently at 70–80% utilisation, consider upgrading before issues occur.
- **Correlate metrics:** high CPU with normal memory often means a CPU-bound workload. High memory with CPU spikes may indicate memory pressure.

## Coming soon

- **Alerts:** get notified when metrics exceed thresholds
- **Export:** download metrics data as CSV
- **Integrations:** send metrics to external monitoring tools