VMware vSphere 🔗

Description 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector provides this integration as the vsphere monitor type for the Smart Agent Receiver.

Use this integration to collect metrics from vSphere through the vSphere API. You can install this integration on the same server used by vSphere if it’s running on Linux or Windows.

This integration is available on Kubernetes, Linux, and Windows.

Requirements 🔗

This monitor uses VMware govmomi SDK, which officially supports vCenter 6.5, 6.7, and 7.0. While this monitor might work with vCenter 5.1, 5.5, and 6.0, these versions are not officially supported.

Note

When you add a custom role, don’t assign any privileges to it. The role is created as a read-only role with three system-defined privileges: System.Anonymous, System.View, and System.Read. For more information, see the vSphere official documentation on user roles.

Benefits 🔗

After you configure the integration, you can access these features:

View metrics. You can create your own custom dashboards, and most monitors provide built-in dashboards as well. For information about dashboards, see View dashboards in Observability Cloud.
View a data-driven visualization of the physical servers, virtual machines, AWS instances, and other resources in your environment that are visible to Infrastructure Monitoring. For information about navigators, see Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring navigators.
Access the Metric Finder and search for metrics sent by the monitor. For information, see Use the Metric Finder.

Installation 🔗

Follow these steps to deploy this integration:

Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform:
Configure the monitor, as described in the Configuration section.
Restart the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

Configuration 🔗

To use this integration of a Smart Agent monitor with the Collector:

Include the Smart Agent receiver in your configuration file.
Add the monitor type to the Collector configuration, both in the receiver and pipelines sections.

Read more on how to Use Smart Agent monitors with the Collector.
See how to set up the Smart Agent receiver.
Learn about config options in Collector default configuration.

Note

Provide a vsphere monitor entry in your Collector or Smart Agent (deprecated) configuration. Use the appropriate form for your agent type.

Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector 🔗

To activate this monitor in the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, add the following to your agent configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/vsphere:
    type: vsphere
    ...  # Additional config

To complete the monitor activation, you must also include the smartagent/vsphere receiver item in a metrics pipeline. To do this, add the receiver item to the service > pipelines > metrics > receivers section of your configuration file. For example:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/vsphere]

Smart Agent 🔗

To activate this monitor in the Smart Agent, add the following to your agent configuration:

monitors:  # All monitor config goes under this key
  - type: vsphere
    ...  # Additional config

The following is an example vsphere Smart Agent monitor configuration:

monitors:
  - type: vsphere
    host: "172.16.248.140"
    username: "[email protected]"
    password: "S3cr3t"
    insecureSkipVerify: true

See Install and configure the SignalFx Smart Agent for an autogenerated example of a YAML configuration file, with default values where applicable.

Configuration settings 🔗

The following table shows the configuration options for the vsphere monitor:

Option	Required	Type	Description
`host`	No	`string`	Hostname or IP address of the vSphere instance. For example, `127.0.0.1`.
`port`	No	`integer`	Port of the vSphere instance. The default value is `0`)
`username`	No	`string`	vSphere username.
`password`	No	`string`	vSphere password.
`insecureSkipVerify`	No	`bool`	Controls whether a client verifies the server’s certificate chain and host name. The default value is `false`.
`inventoryRefreshInterval`	No	`integer`	Controls how often to reload the inventory and inventory metrics. The default value is `60s`.
`perfBatchSize`	No	`integer`	Controls the maximum number of inventory objects to be queried for performance data per request. Set this value to `0` to request performance data for all inventory objects at a time. The default value is `10`.
`tlsCACertPath`	No	`string`	Path to the CA certificate file.
`tlsClientCertificatePath`	No	`string`	Path to the client certificate. Both `tlsClientKeyPath` and `tlsClientCertificatePath` must be present. The files must contain PEM encoded data.
`tlsClientKeyPath`	No	`string`	Path to the keyfile.

To report metrics for a vSphere deployment, this monitor logs into a vCenter Server and retrieves data about the deployment and real time performance data on a regular interval. When the monitor first runs, it logs in to the vCenter Server and traverses the inventory, gathering and caching all of the hosts and virtual machines and their available metrics.

After the initial sweep, the monitor queries the vCenter for performance data and metrics. This query runs every 20 seconds, which is the interval at which the vCenter makes real time performance data available. As a result, regardless of the intervalSeconds value in the agent configuration, this monitor runs every 20 seconds.

The monitor also refreshes, at a configurable interval, the cache of hosts, virtual machines, and metrics. By default, this refresh takes place every 60 seconds; however, this interval can be changed by updating the configuration field InventoryRefreshInterval.

Example 🔗

See the following configuration example:

receivers:
  smartagent/vsphere:
    type: vsphere
    host: hostname
    username: user
    password: pass
    insecureSkipVerify: true
exporters:
  signalfx:
    access_token: abc123
    realm: us2
service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers:
        - smartagent/vsphere
      exporters:
        - signalfx

Metrics 🔗

The following metrics are available for this integration:

Notes 🔗

Learn more about the available metric types in Observability Cloud.
Default metrics are those metrics included in host-based subscriptions in Observability Cloud, such as host, container, or bundled metrics. Custom metrics are not provided by default and might be subject to charges. See more about metric categories.
To add additional metrics, see how to configure extraMetrics using the Collector.

Get help 🔗

If you are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, try these tips:

Submit a case in the Splunk Support Portal
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers
Call Splunk Customer Support
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers
Ask a question and get answers through community support at Splunk Answers
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers and free trial users
Join the Splunk #observability user group Slack channel to communicate with customers, partners, and Splunk employees worldwide
- Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers and free trial users
- To learn how to join, see Get Started with Splunk Community - Chat groups

To learn about even more support options, see Splunk Customer Success.

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