Hardware monitoring service on this host is not responding or not available

Hardware monitoring service on this host is not responding or not available

Today I was troubleshooting a rather simple problem but took me a while to figure out. An ESXi host (5.0) was showing the warning “Hardware monitoring service on this host is not responding or not available” in the Hardware Status tab.

The solution was quite simple, the CIM Server wasn’t running and therefor the data was unavailable.

To enable this service go to “Configuration“, select “Security Profile” under Software and click “Properties” next to “Services“.

In the new window select the “CIM Server” and hit the “Options” button.


Click the Start button and change the Startup Policy to your desired setup, save this by clicking OK and finally close the “Service Properties” window by clicking OK.

As a final step you will have to reset your sensors. You can do this in the Hardware Status tab. Make sure you reset the sensors for the Sensors and System event log. The service will now collect the information.

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Niels Engelen
Working as a Principal Analyst in Product Management for Veeam Software with an interest in anything virtual and cloud with a strong focus on AWS, Azure and Microsoft 365. He is also a VMware Certified Professional, a Veeam Certified Architect and gained the VMware vExpert award (2012-2022).

2 thoughts on “Hardware monitoring service on this host is not responding or not available

  1. The CIM service on my ESXi is running but i still get the error message when go to the Hardware Status tab. This problem seems to be new. I use to be able to turn on VMs from vCenter, now I can not. I have to turn them on by directly connecting to the ESXi server. Running 5.0. Any help, thank you.

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