VMware vSphere Configuration

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Setup

To enable VMware vSphere monitoring, add the vCenter or ESXi connection details to your Glouton configuration. You can monitor multiple vCenter appliances or standalone ESXi hosts by adding multiple entries to the list.

Linux
Windows

sudo tee /etc/glouton/conf.d/99-vsphere.conf > /dev/null << 'EOF'
vsphere:
  - url: "https://<vcenter-url>/sdk"
    username: "<username>"
    password: "<password>"
    insecure_skip_verify: false
    skip_monitor_vms: false
EOF

Create or edit the file C:\ProgramData\glouton\conf.d\99-vsphere.conf:

vsphere:
  - url: "https://<vcenter-url>/sdk"
    username: "<username>"
    password: "<password>"
    insecure_skip_verify: false
    skip_monitor_vms: false

Glouton automatically detects configuration changes — no restart is needed.

Multiple vCenter Instances

To monitor several vCenter appliances or ESXi hosts, add multiple entries:

vsphere:
  - url: "https://vcenter-prod.example.com/sdk"
    username: "monitoring@vsphere.local"
    password: "secret1"
  - url: "https://vcenter-staging.example.com/sdk"
    username: "monitoring@vsphere.local"
    password: "secret2"
  - url: "https://esxi-standalone.example.com/sdk"
    username: "root"
    password: "secret3"

Each entry is monitored independently. Resources from all instances appear in Bleemeo with their respective datacenter and cluster labels.

Options Reference

Option	Default	Description
`url`	—	URL of the vCenter or ESXi SDK endpoint (e.g., `https://vcenter.example.com/sdk`)
`username`	—	Username for vCenter or ESXi authentication
`password`	—	Password for vCenter or ESXi authentication
`insecure_skip_verify`	`false`	Set to `true` to skip SSL certificate verification (use only for self-signed certificates)
`skip_monitor_vms`	`false`	Set to `true` to only monitor clusters and hosts, skipping VM-level metrics

About `skip_monitor_vms`

When set to true, Glouton skips all VM-level metric collection. This is useful for large environments where you only need host and cluster-level visibility, or to reduce the number of monitored objects.

Cluster, host, and datastore metrics are still collected normally. The vms_running_count and vms_stopped_count metrics on hosts are also still reported.

Permissions

The vSphere user account needs read-only permissions on the objects you want to monitor. At minimum, the account should have read access to:

Datacenters
Clusters
Hosts
Virtual machines
Datastores