Monitoring VMWare vSphere with Grafana and Telegraf

1. Collector Configuration

You need the latest Telegraf version which includes the vSphere Plugin!

On Ubuntu or Debian you can get it with:

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf_1.14.5-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i telegraf_1.14.5-1_amd64.deb

Now add the following lines to your ‘/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf’:

### VMWARE ####

## Realtime
instance [[inputs.vsphere]]
interval = "60s"   
vcenters = [ "https://VCENTERSERVER/sdk" ]   
username = "USERNAME@vsphere.local"   
password = "PASSWORD"   
insecure_skip_verify = true   
force_discover_on_init = true   
# Exclude all historical metrics   
datastore_metric_exclude = ["*"]   
cluster_metric_exclude = ["*"]   
datacenter_metric_exclude = ["*"]   
collect_concurrency = 5   
discover_concurrency = 5 

# Historical 
instance [[inputs.vsphere]]   
interval = "300s"   
vcenters = [ "https://VCENTERSERVER/sdk" ]
username = "USERNAME@vsphere.local"   
password = "PASSWORD"   
insecure_skip_verify = true   
force_discover_on_init = true   
host_metric_exclude = ["*"] 
# Exclude realtime metrics   
vm_metric_exclude = ["*"] 
# Exclude realtime metrics   
max_query_metrics = 256   
collect_concurrency = 3

2. Download Grafana Dashboard

You can download the dashboard from: https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/8159

After downloading import it into your Grafana installation.

3. Piechart

This Dashboard uses the Piechart plugin for Grafana. You can install it with:

grafana-cli plugins install grafana-piechart-panel

4. Screenshots

If all works you should see something like this: