VMware vSphere

Collect metrics from VMware vCenter and ESXi hosts — VM CPU/memory, datastore I/O, and cluster health — using vmware_exporter. Centralise your virtualisation telemetry in xScaler alongside your other infrastructure.

Pattern: vmware_exporter → Prometheus scrape → xScaler remote_write

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Prerequisites

• VMware vCenter 6.5 or later
• Read-only service account created in vCenter ([email protected])
• xScaler tenant credentials (token + tenant ID)

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Option A — Prometheus Exporter

Run vmware_exporter as a Docker container, pointed at your vCenter:

docker run -d \
  -p 9272:9272 \
  -e VSPHERE_HOST=vcenter.local \
  -e VSPHERE_USER=[email protected] \
  -e VSPHERE_PASSWORD=secret \
  pryorda/vmware_exporter

The exporter listens on port 9272. Configure Prometheus to scrape and remote_write:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: vmware_vsphere
    static_configs:
      - targets: ["localhost:9272"]
    scrape_interval: 60s

remote_write:
  - url: https://euw1-01.m.xscalerlabs.com/api/v1/push
    authorization:
      type: Bearer
      credentials: <token>
    headers:
      X-Scope-OrgID: "<tenant-id>"

Option B — Grafana Alloy

prometheus.scrape "vmware_vsphere" {
  targets          = [{"__address__" = "localhost:9272"}]
  scrape_interval  = "60s"
  forward_to       = [prometheus.remote_write.xscaler.receiver]
}

prometheus.remote_write "xscaler" {
  endpoint {
    url = "https://euw1-01.m.xscalerlabs.com/api/v1/push"
    authorization {
      type        = "Bearer"
      credentials = "<token>"
    }
    headers = { "X-Scope-OrgID" = "<tenant-id>" }
  }
}

Option C — OpenTelemetry Collector

receivers:
  vcenter:
    endpoint: https://vcenter.local
    username: [email protected]
    password: secret
    collection_interval: 60s
    tls:
      insecure_skip_verify: false

processors:
  batch: {}

exporters:
  otlphttp/xscaler:
    endpoint: https://euw1-01.m.xscalerlabs.com
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer <token>"
      X-Scope-OrgID: "<tenant-id>"
    compression: gzip

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [vcenter]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlphttp/xscaler]

---

Logs

Collect ESXi host and vCenter logs. Add the following to your Alloy config:

local.file_match "vmware_vsphere_logs" {
  path_targets = [{
    __address__ = "localhost",
    __path__    = "/var/log/vmware/*.log",
    instance    = constants.hostname,
    job         = "integrations/vmware_vsphere",
  }]
}

loki.source.file "vmware_vsphere_logs" {
  targets    = local.file_match.vmware_vsphere_logs.targets
  forward_to = [loki.write.xscaler.receiver]
}

loki.write "xscaler" {
  endpoint {
    url = "https://euw1-01.l.xscalerlabs.com/api/v1/logs/push"

    http_client_config {
      authorization {
        type        = "Bearer"
        credentials = env("XSCALER_TOKEN")
      }
    }

    headers = { "X-Scope-OrgID" = env("XSCALER_TENANT_ID") }
  }
}

Key metrics

Metric	Description
vmware_vm_power_state	Current power state of each virtual machine (1 = on)
vmware_vm_cpu_usage_average	Average CPU usage for each VM in MHz
vmware_vm_mem_usage_average	Average memory usage for each VM in MB
vmware_datastore_capacity_size	Total capacity of each datastore in bytes
vmware_host_cpu_usage_average	Average CPU usage across ESXi host in MHz
vmware_host_mem_usage_average	Average memory usage across ESXi host in MB