About the Splunk VMware OVA for ITSI

The Splunk VMware OVA for ITSI is a preconfigured virtual machine with a lightweight operating system, a Splunk heavy forwarder, and all necessary add-ons and supporting add-ons to collect metrics, inventory, task, and event data from VMWare vCenter Servers. The Splunk VMware OVA for ITSI deploys a Data Collection Node (DCN) to collect data for the Splunk App for Infrastructure (SAI). The OVA sends metrics data to metrics indexes in your indexer tier.

VMware vCenter Servers and resources, including datacenters, clusters, ESXi hosts, and virtual machines appear as entities when you start monitoring a vCenter Server with a DCN. You can integrate SAI entities in ITSI to create ITSI services from the SAI entities.

DCNs are required components for any SAI deployment that collects VMware vCenter Server data. If you can't deploy an OVA, you can manually configure a Splunk heavy forwarder to perform as a DCN. For more information, see Configure a heavy forwarder to be a DCN in the Install and Upgrade Splunk App for Infrastructure guide.