Discovering your virtual resources by way of vCenter is the preferred approach.

Note: You might find a vCenter to be running on a VM that it (the vCenter) manages. For example, this could be the case Virtual section of the Device Card reveal that the device is running a virtual machine, but the role of the device is vCenter.

Guidelines

  • Provide the IP address of the vCenter at discovery scan time.
  • Your Credentials Library (SETTINGS > Libraries > Credentials) must include the WhatsUp Gold VMware credentials for the vCenter.
  • (Preferred) include VMware Credentials in WhatsUp Gold for each ESXi host (if they differ from the vCenter credentials). This is best practice, but some host/guest metrics are available through vCenter without them (that is, using only VMware credentials you provided for vCenter).

Discover

Discover and add monitoring to a vCenter and its managed elements

  1. From the Discovery Scan wizard (DISCOVER > New Scan), input the IP address of one or more vCenters. (You can unselect the Gateway IP and Local Subnet checkboxes.)
  2. In the Expand panel of the Start tab, click the Virtualization Environment checkbox.
  3. In the Credentials tab of the Discovery Scan wizard, include the appropriate VMware credential, click the Review and Run tab and then click Run to begin the scan(Including the VMware credential for vCenter enables WhatsUp Gold to identify the device as a virtual host and learn about its managed hosts and their guest VMs).Nodes (discovered devices) display on Discovery Map.
  4. After the scan completes, select the VMware vCenter and discovered virtual machine nodes on the DISCOVER map or grid, and click the Start Monitoring button to add them to My Network Map with their associated default monitors.

    On My Network Map with the Virtual Overlay selected () lines of association show relationship between hosts and virtual machines and hosts to their vCenter.

  5. After a few minutes, check the virtual monitoring dashboard (ANALYZE > Dashboards > Virtual Monitoring) to see data gathered from monitors of newly discovered virtual devices.
Tip: If you delete a monitored vCenter from the WhatsUp Gold Network Map, the existing host/guest relationships between its managed virtual hosts and virtual machines will no longer be obvious to WhatsUp Gold. This can also impact the continuity of monitoring and logging. To retain continuity of information and host/guest relationships with WhatsUp Gold after a vCenter deletion, delete each virtual host, re-discover, and from the Discovered Devices Map, use Update Monitoring button to restore these relationships.