Ability to monitor VMware’s API

azarris

I saw the graphs created on Solarwinds for monitoring the VMware ESX hosts. I had similar results with Cacti trending. When you queried the host via SNMP, you are only interfacing with the ESX Service Console not the hypervisor. It appears that with VMware ESX 3.x and above, specific SNMP subagent which allowed communications with the hypervisor have been removed.  

From speaking with VMware engineers, statistics gathering can only achieve by using VMware’s application programming interface (API). One such third party example is vKernel. That application hooks into virtual center to retrieve information about the ESX such as CPU load, memory consumption and network interface bandwidth utilization. Virtual Center is already gathering all that information, it’s just a matter of determining how to retrieve it.  

Does Solarwinds have an application which can hook into VMware’s API similar to what vKernel does?

FormerMember

From speaking with VMware engineers, statistics gathering can only achieve by using VMware’s application programming interface (API).

That's not quite accurate.  We do gather statistics via SNMP.  What is also true is that there are statistics that are only available via Virtual Center using VMware's proprietary APIs.  We don't have a way to do that yet.  We've been talking with VMware about support more standard methods of data access.  That may yet happen, or we may create a VMware-specific method for collecting data.