VMware vSphere OpenTelemetry Assets

VMware vSphere is a server virtualization platform comprising vCenter Server (centralized management) and ESXi hypervisors (compute hosts). It abstracts physical compute, memory, storage, and networking resources into pools that are allocated to virtual machines.

The VMware vSphere OpenTelemetry assets provide pre-built dashboards, alert rules, and SLO templates for infrastructure health, host and VM performance, storage capacity, and memory pressure. They use metrics from the OpenTelemetry vcenterreceiver and cover availability, CPU, memory, and storage operations.

• vSphere versions: Tested against vSphere 7.0 (API version 7.0). The vcenterreceiver is expected to work with vSphere 6.5 and later.
• OpenTelemetry Collector: Tested with otelcol-contrib v0.147.0 (vcenterreceiver v0.147.0).

You need Elasticsearch for storing and searching your data and Kibana for visualizing and managing it. You can use our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud, which is recommended, or self-manage the Elastic Stack on your own hardware.

The vcenterreceiver connects to vCenter Server via the vSphere API. Ensure that:

1. You have a vCenter Server or SDK-enabled ESXi host reachable from the collector.
2. You have a user account with Read-only or View permissions. For full metric coverage, grant the user the Performance.ModifyIntervals privilege (or equivalent) so the receiver can set the statistics collection level.
3. The collector host can reach vCenter on port 443 (HTTPS).

Configure the OpenTelemetry Collector or the Elastic Observability Distribution for OpenTelemetry (EDOT) to receive vSphere metrics and export them to Elasticsearch. The following example uses the vcenterreceiver and the elasticsearch/otel exporter with mapping.mode: otel.

receivers:
  vcenter:
    endpoint: ${env:VCENTER_ENDPOINT}
    username: ${env:VCENTER_USERNAME}
    password: ${env:VCENTER_PASSWORD}
    collection_interval: 2m
    initial_delay: 1s
    tls:
      insecure_skip_verify: ${env:VCENTER_TLS_INSECURE_SKIP_VERIFY}

processors:
  batch:
    timeout: 10s
    send_batch_size: 1024

exporters:
  elasticsearch/otel:
    endpoints:
      - ${env:ES_ENDPOINT}
    user: ${env:ES_USERNAME}
    password: ${env:ES_PASSWORD}
    mapping:
      mode: otel

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [vcenter]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [elasticsearch/otel]
		

Refer to the metadata.yaml of the OpenTelemetry vCenter receiver for details on available metrics.

This integration includes one or more Kibana dashboards that visualizes the data collected by the integration. The screenshots below illustrate how the ingested data is displayed.

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