VMware Monitoring with Icinga
Monitor VMware ESXi hosts, virtual machines, and datastores with Icinga – open-source, agentless, and without per-host licensing. All you need is a connection to your VMware vCenter® or VMware ESXi™ host.
With Icinga’s VMware monitoring, you get full visibility into your vSphere environment: cluster health, resource utilization across hosts, VM availability, datastore capacity, and event tracking – all integrated into the same Icinga instance that monitors your broader IT infrastructure.
Icinga connects to vCenter or directly to ESXi hosts via the vSphere API. No agents need to be installed on individual virtual machines.
As Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware continues to drive up licensing costs across the industry, many IT teams are moving toward open-source monitoring that scales without unpredictable price increases. Icinga gives you enterprise-grade VMware observability without vendor lock-in.
Get an overview over all details of your VMware cluster
View and filter all events occurring in a VMware private cloud
Monitor the utilization of resources of VMware Hosts, Data Stores and VMs
Integrate VMware monitoring with Icinga and the rest of your infrastructure
Receive alerts when anomalies and errors are detected
Store metrics in InfluxDB for simpler debugging and history views
Monitoring VMware Hosts
Monitoring the VMware hosts is essential to identify fundamental errors of a VMware cloud environment. Occurring problems on this layer eventually effect the virtual machines running on the cluster.
- Get system information like the vendor, model, service tag and more
- Monitor the utilization of memory, CPU and HBAs
- See the amount of running VMs on a single host
- Get specific information about network interfaces
- Hardware monitoring of batteries, cables, fans, power supply, processors and more
- Find out about connected PCI devices
- View VMware Events related to certain VMware hosts
Monitoring VMware Virtual Machines
Icinga extends its comprehensive vmware monitoring to virtual machines, ensuring you have insights into their availability, performance, and resource usage. You get a summary of important aspects of every virtual machine, letting you have the right data at hand at any time.
- System information like IP address, operating system, VMotion attempts and more
- Monitor the resource utilization of the memory and CPU
- Storage usage information correlated to related data stores
- Precise information about connected virtual hardware
- Alarms related to virtual machines
- Monitor VMware events related to certain virtual machines
- Direct connection through links to VMRC, HTML5 UI and MOB interface
Monitoring VMware Datastores
Staying on top of your storage infrastructure is vital for any IT environment. With Icinga’s vmware monitoring capabilities, you can track your VMware datastores to understand current usage and remaining capacity. Additionally, an event overview helps quickly pinpoint and address potential errors.
Store VMware Metrics in InfluxDB
The Icinga module for vSphere comes with a native integration for InfluxDB. The metrics collected by Icinga are sent with a resolution of up to 20 s directly to InfluxDB, where one or multiple InfluxDB endpoints store the data.
Automated and Integrated Server Monitoring
The Icinga module for vSphere® integrates directly into your existing Icinga setup. Gathered VMware data is used to automate monitoring checks and feeds into the Icinga Web interface alongside all other monitored infrastructure.
Combining the Icinga module for vSphere with Icinga Director enables automatic import of VMware hosts, virtual machines, datastores, and compute resources into Icinga. That data becomes the source for monitoring checks, alerts, and notifications – with no manual configuration per object.
Why Teams Choose Icinga for VMware Monitoring
Unlike proprietary monitoring tools that charge per sensor or per monitored host, Icinga is fully open-source with no usage-based pricing. Whether you monitor 10 VMs or 10,000, the software cost stays the same.
Icinga also avoids the architectural limitation of siloed VMware-only monitoring. The same Icinga instance that monitors your vSphere environment also covers Linux and Windows servers, network devices, Kubernetes clusters, databases, and cloud services – one platform, one alert workflow, one place to look.
Get Started with Icinga vSphere®
Get going with your full-stack enterprise-ready monitoring solution. Follow the installation documentation.
FAQ
What does Icinga monitor in a VMware environment?
Icinga monitors VMware ESXi hosts, vSphere clusters, individual virtual machines, and datastores. Key metrics include CPU and memory utilization, disk I/O, datastore capacity, network throughput, and VM power state. Icinga connects via the VMware vSphere API - no agent installation on individual VMs is required.
Does Icinga require agents on VMware virtual machines?
No. Icinga's VMware monitoring is fully agentless. It connects directly to VMware vCenter or ESXi hosts via the vSphere API to collect performance data, health status, and event information. Optionally, agents can be used to monitor local resources on the virtual machines.
Is Icinga free for VMware monitoring?
Icinga is fully open-source with no sensor limits and no per-host licensing. There are no costs tied to the number of VMs or ESXi hosts you monitor. Optional commercial subscriptions are available for support. For enterprise Linux distributions like RHEL, Amazon Linux 2, and SLES, access to official Icinga packages requires a Repository Subscription. This subscription provides access to these packages and additional software extensions.
How does Icinga integrate VMware monitoring with the rest of my infrastructure?
Icinga Director can automatically import VMware hosts, virtual machines, datastores, and compute resources as monitored objects. Your VMware environment is then monitored using the same checks, alerts, and notification workflows as the rest of your infrastructure.
Can Icinga store VMware metrics long-term?
Yes. The Icinga module for vSphere includes native InfluxDB integration. Metrics are written at up to 20-second resolution, enabling historical trend analysis, capacity planning, and Grafana dashboards.
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