ob-col/receiver/vcenterreceiver

vCenter Receiver

Status
Stability	alpha: metrics
Distributions	contrib, observiq, sumo
Issues
Code Owners	@djaglowski, @schmikei

This receiver fetches metrics from a vCenter or ESXi host running VMware vSphere APIs.

Prerequisites

This receiver has been built to support ESXi and vCenter versions:

• 7.5
• 7.0
• 6.7

A “Read Only” user assigned to a vSphere with permissions to the vCenter server, cluster and all subsequent resources being monitored must be specified in order for the receiver to retrieve information about them.

Configuration

Parameter	Default	Type	Notes
endpoint		String	Endpoint to the vCenter Server or ESXi host that has the sdk path enabled. Required. The expected format is <protocol>://<hostname> i.e: https://vcsa.hostname.localnet
username		String	Required
password		String	Required
tls		TLSClientSetting	Not Required. Will use defaults for configtls.TLSClientSetting. By default insecure settings are rejected and certificate verification is on.
collection_interval	2m	Duration	This receiver collects metrics on an interval. If the vCenter is fairly large, this value may need to be increased. Valid time units are ns, us (or µs), ms, s, m, h
initial_delay	1s	Duration	Defines how long this receiver waits before starting.

Example Configuration

receivers:
  vcenter:
    endpoint: http://localhost:15672
    username: otelu
    password: ${env:VCENTER_PASSWORD}
    collection_interval: 5m
    initial_delay: 1s
    metrics: []

The full list of settings exposed for this receiver are documented here with detailed sample configurations here. TLS config is documented further under the opentelemetry collector's configtls package.

Metrics

Details about the metrics produced by this receiver can be found in metadata.yaml with further documentation in documentation.md

Feature gates

Performance metrics dimensions

These metrics were incorrectly dimensioned previously but the desired fix is a breaking change. To avoid breaking existing users, this feature gate is used to control whether the dimensions are fixed or not. This feature gate is planned to removed in two months.

• vcenter.vm.network.throughput
• vcenter.vm.network.usage
• vcenter.vm.network.packet.count
• vcenter.vm.disk.latency.avg
• vcenter.vm.disk.latency.max
• vcenter.host.network.usage
• vcenter.host.network.throughput
• vcenter.host.network.packet.count
• vcenter.host.network.packet.errors
• vcenter.host.disk.latency.avg
• vcenter.host.disk.latency.max
• vcenter.host.disk.throughput

These metrics were improperly dimensioned and needed another metric attribute object in order to properly dimension the data.

1. v0.84.0, August 2023:

• The version of the receiver will keep default behavior.
• receiver.vcenter.emitPerfMetricsWithObjects is disabled by default.

1. v0.86.0, September 2023:

• The receiver will emit the object metric attribute by default
• receiver.vcenter.emitPerfMetricsWithObjects is enabled by default.

1. v0.88.0, October 2023:

• The feature gates are removed.
• Performance metrics will always include the object metric attribute.