VMware vSphere / VCF

Overview

Netwatch monitors VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments through the VMware API, connecting to vCenter Server (or a VCF-managed vCenter instance) to collect virtual machine, host, cluster, and datastore metrics. This gives visibility into VM-level detail that is not available from OS-level monitoring alone.

Recommended approach: Use the VMware API and/or the Netwatch agent to monitor virtual machines. Avoid adding a WMI service account to your Windows security profiles solely to collect VM data — the VMware API already exposes this detail without expanding WMI access, and the Netwatch agent covers OS-level metrics on the guest itself. See Windows monitoring: WinRM vs. WMI below.

What Netwatch Monitors

• Virtual Machines
  • Power state and guest OS status
  • CPU, memory, and disk usage
  • Network throughput per VM
• ESXi Hosts
  • CPU and memory utilization
  • Host connection and power state
  • Hardware sensor alerts
• Clusters
  • HA and DRS status
  • Aggregate resource utilization
• Datastores
  • Capacity, free space, and utilization
  • Datastore-to-host and datastore-to-VM mappings
• VCF-specific
  • Workload domain and management domain visibility (where SDDC Manager/API access is provided)
• Discovery
  • Automatic discovery of hosts, VMs, clusters, and datastores under a vCenter instance

Prerequisites

• vCenter Server (or VCF-managed vCenter) reachable from the Netwatch server, default port 443
• A dedicated API account with at least read-only privileges at the vCenter or cluster level
• For VCF environments, API access details for SDDC Manager if workload/management domain data is required
• Confirmation of proper API configuration/permissions from the customer before onboarding (see note below)

Netwatch will configure VM-level monitoring once the customer provides access to the VMware API with appropriate read permissions.

1. Configure VMware API Access

1. Log in to vCenter Server.
2. Create a dedicated monitoring account (or identify an existing service account) with read-only access at the vCenter or cluster level.
3. Note the vCenter FQDN/IP address and confirm port 443 is reachable from the Netwatch server.
4. If monitoring a VCF workload/management domain, gather the corresponding SDDC Manager API details.

2. Add the vCenter Host in Netwatch

1. Navigate to Configuration → Hosts.
2. Click Create Host.
3. Enter the following details:
   • Host name: A descriptive name for the vCenter instance (e.g., vCenter-Production)
   • Host group: Select an appropriate group (e.g., Virtualization)
   • Agent interface: Enter the vCenter Server IP address or FQDN
4. Go to the Macros tab and add:
   • {$VMWARE.URL}: vCenter API URL (e.g., https://vcenter.example.com/sdk)
   • {$VMWARE.USERNAME}: API account username
   • {$VMWARE.PASSWORD}: API account password (use a Secret Text macro)
5. Click Update to save the host configuration.

3. Link the VMware Templates

1. On the host configuration page, go to the Templates tab.
2. Click Select and link VMware to the vCenter host — this is the root template that connects to the VMware API and runs discovery for hypervisors, virtual machines, clusters, and datastores.
3. Click Update to apply the template.
4. As discovery runs, Netwatch automatically creates hosts for each discovered ESXi hypervisor and VM guest and links them to the VMware Hypervisor and VMware Guest templates respectively — no manual linking is required for these.
5. For datastore-level metrics, discovered datastores are linked to the VMware Datastore template automatically as well.

4. Verify Data Collection

1. Navigate to Monitoring → Latest Data.
2. Select the vCenter host.
3. Confirm that VM, host, cluster, and datastore metrics are populating.