Collect VMware vSphere, vCenter and ESXi performance metrics and send them to InfluxDB

External dependencies

• govmomi
• influxDB go client

Both are installed via go dep when go getting the project:

Run

go get github.com/oxalide/vsphere-influxdb-go

This will install the project in your $GOBIN($GOPATH/bin). If you have appended $GOBIN to your $PATH, you will be able to call it directly. Otherwise, you'll have to call it with its full path. Example:

vsphere-influxdb-go

or :

$GOBIN/vsphere-influxdb-go

Configure

You'll need a JSON file with all your vCenters/ESXi to connect to, the InfluxDB connection details(url, username/password, database to use), and the metrics to collect. Additionally you can provide a vCenter/ESXi server and InfluxDB connection details via environment variables, wich is extremly helpful when running inside a container.

For InfluxDB set INFLUX_HOSTNAME, INFLUX_USERNAME, INFLUX_PASSWORD and INFLUX_DATABASE. For vSphere set VSPHERE_HOSTNAME, VSPHERE_USERNAME and VSPHERE_PASSWORD and keep in mind, that currently only one vCenter/ESXi can be added via environment variable.

If you set a domain, it will be automaticaly removed from the names of the found objects.

Metrics collected are defined by associating ObjectType groups with Metric groups. To see all available metrics, check out this page.

Note: Not all metrics are available directly, you might need to change your metric collection level. A table with the level needed for each metric is availble here, and you can find a pyVmomi script that cahanges to collect level in the tools folder of the project.

An example of configuration file is here.

You need to place it at /etc/binaryname.json (/etc/vsphere-influxdb.json by default) or you can specify a different location using the config flag.

Run as a service

Create a crontab to run it every X minutes(one minute is fine - in our case, ~30 vCenters, ~100 ESXi and ~1400 VMs take approximately 25s to collect all metrics - rather impressive, i might add).

* * * * * $HOME/work/go/bin/vsphere-influxdb-go

Example dashboards

• https://grafana.com/dashboards/1299 (thanks to @exbane )
• https://grafana.com/dashboards/3556 (VMware cloud overview, mostly provisioning/global cloud usage stats)
• https://grafana.com/dashboards/3571 (VMware performance, mostly VM oriented performance stats)

Contributions welcome!

TODO

• Add service discovery(or probably something like Viper for easier and more flexible configuration with multiple backends)
• Add extra tags(cluster for the hosts, etc.)

Contributing

You are welcome to contribute!

License

The original project, upon which this one is based, is written by cblomart, sends the data to Graphite, and is available here.

This one is licensed under GPLv3. You can find a copy of the license in LICENSE.txt