Here I am referring to a vm in the OS sense. Suppose you are forced to run code on a virtual machine running on a blade computer hidden behind locked doors. Access to the machine is limited to a remote desktop connection. You suspect that the machine is far too busy for its own good. Is there any way to test that? Is there any way to separate network latency from the box being slow, or perhaps just plain busy restoring a backup to fix up the most recent crash of some piece of hardware or who-knows-what software?

Something that periodically runs a lightweight benchmark and logs the results comes to mind. Is there something that is commonly used for such measurments? I would rather not add too badly to machine's workload, but it gets sloooooowwwwwww at times :( Getting some data to objectify that statement could be useful.