Documentation Grafana Cloud Instrument and send data Grafana Alloy Reference Components otelcol otelcol.receiver.vcenter

Experimental

otelcol.receiver.vcenter

EXPERIMENTAL: This is an experimental component. Experimental components are subject to frequent breaking changes, and may be removed with no equivalent replacement. The stability.level flag must be set to experimental to use the component.

otelcol.receiver.vcenter accepts metrics from a vCenter or ESXi host running VMware vSphere APIs and forwards it to other otelcol.* components.

NOTE: otelcol.receiver.vcenter is a wrapper over the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector vcenter receiver from the otelcol-contrib distribution. Bug reports or feature requests will be redirected to the upstream repository, if necessary.

Multiple otelcol.receiver.vcenter components can be specified by giving them different labels.

The full list of metrics that can be collected can be found in vcenter receiver documentation.

Prerequisites

This receiver has been built to support ESXi and vCenter versions:

• 8
• 7.0

A “Read Only” user assigned to a vSphere with permissions to the vCenter server, cluster and all subsequent resources being monitored must be specified in order for the receiver to retrieve information about them.

Usage

alloy Copy

otelcol.receiver.vcenter "LABEL" {
  endpoint = "VCENTER_ENDPOINT"
  username = "VCENTER_USERNAME"
  password = "VCENTER_PASSWORD"

  output {
    metrics = [...]
  }
}

Arguments

otelcol.receiver.vcenter supports the following arguments:

endpoint has the format <protocol>://<hostname>. For example, https://vcsa.hostname.localnet.

Blocks

The following blocks are supported inside the definition of otelcol.receiver.vcenter:

tls block

The tls block configures TLS settings used for a server. If the tls block isn’t provided, TLS won’t be used for connections to the server.

The following arguments are supported:

If the server doesn’t support TLS, you must set the insecure argument to true.

To disable tls for connections to the server, set the insecure argument to true.

If reload_interval is set to "0s", the certificate never reloaded.

The following pairs of arguments are mutually exclusive and can’t both be set simultaneously:

• ca_pem and ca_file
• cert_pem and cert_file
• key_pem and key_file

If cipher_suites is left blank, a safe default list is used. See the Go TLS documentation for a list of supported cipher suites.

metrics block

metric block

resource_attributes block

resource_attribute block

debug_metrics block

The debug_metrics block configures the metrics that this component generates to monitor its state.

The following arguments are supported:

disable_high_cardinality_metrics is the Grafana Alloy equivalent to the telemetry.disableHighCardinalityMetrics feature gate in the OpenTelemetry Collector. It removes attributes that could cause high cardinality metrics. For example, attributes with IP addresses and port numbers in metrics about HTTP and gRPC connections are removed.

level is the Alloy equivalent to the telemetry.metrics.level feature gate in the OpenTelemetry Collector. Possible values are "none", "basic", "normal" and "detailed".

output block

The output block configures a set of components to forward resulting telemetry data to.

The following arguments are supported:

You must specify the output block, but all its arguments are optional. By default, telemetry data is dropped. Configure the metrics, logs, and traces arguments accordingly to send telemetry data to other components.

Exported fields

otelcol.receiver.vcenter does not export any fields.

Component health

otelcol.receiver.vcenter is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid configuration.

Debug information

otelcol.receiver.vcenter does not expose any component-specific debug information.

Example

This example forwards received telemetry data through a batch processor before finally sending it to an OTLP-capable endpoint:

alloy Copy

otelcol.receiver.vcenter "default" {
  endpoint = "http://localhost:15672"
  username = "otelu"
  password = "password"

  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
  }
}

otelcol.processor.batch "default" {
  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.default.input]
  }
}

otelcol.exporter.otlp "default" {
  client {
    endpoint = sys.env("OTLP_ENDPOINT")
  }
}

Compatible components

otelcol.receiver.vcenter can accept arguments from the following components:

• Components that export OpenTelemetry otelcol.Consumer