VMware Labs released a new Fling called StatsFeeder. The download is available as zip package and the total size is about 11MB.

Quote taken from the Fling page:

Statsfeeder is a tool that enables performance metrics to be retrieved from vCenter and sent to multiple destinations, including 3rd party systems.

The goal of StatsFeeder is to make it easier to collect statistics in a scalable manner. The user specifies the statistics to be collected in an XML file, and StatsFeeder will collect and persist these stats. The default persistence mechanism is comma-separated values, but the user can extend it to persist the data in a variety of formats, including a standard relational database or Key-value store. StatsFeeder is written leveraging significant experience with the performance APIs, allow the metrics to be retrieved in the most efficient manner possible.

StatsFeeder provides a set of Java classes for retrieving stats in a scalable manner for a given vSphere installation.
The statistics to be collected are specified in an .xml configuration file, along with the source vSphere entities and the destination. Instructions on how to edit the sample configuration file are provided within the file itself.

Requirements

As this tool is java based only 1 thing is needed: JRE 1.6 or higher.

Installation

Download the StatsFeeder zip file and extract it. Configure the xml file and run either the shell script for running StatsFeeder on Linux or the .bat file for running StatsFeeder on Windows.

You will need to add some parameters (this is the output on the Linux shell):

# ./GetAllVMProps.sh
usage: ./GetAllVMProps.sh options

This script will retrieve basic information for all VMs created
within vCenter. This is designed to be used in conjuction with StatsFeeder
to provide the mainly static data regarding the available VMs

OPTIONS:
   -?      Show this message
   -h      The vCenter IP address or hostname
   -u      vCenter user name
   -p      vCenter password
   -o      Output file (default: guestInventory.csv)

Hereby a small example:

# ./GetAllVMProps.sh -h 192.168.1.10 -u USER -p PASS
GetAllVMProps [4.1 (Build jenkins-Statsfeeder-671)]
Copyright (c) 2011-2013 VMware, Inc
All rights reserved

MOR TYPE: Folder---group-d1

MOR TYPE: ContainerView---session[0542e2e0-c7c2-db0a-a1e4-af26e95fd243]5257b7ce-a3e9-61be-6011-45db543954b4
ObjectContent Length : 10

#  cat guestInventory.csv
Win7#[LOCAL-2TB] Win7/Win7.vmx#Microsoft Windows 7 (64-bit)#2#4096#GREEN#GREEN##POWERED_ON#vm-43#host-28#192.168.1.150#4000#192.168.1.25#1#1#GREEN#TOOLS_OK#Foonet-VPC#0#0#3598#4096#82264064#0#778#4180#845#791#4089#7#Lab##91#00:50:56:be:05:99
monitorbox#[LOCAL-2TB] monitorbox/monitorbox.vmx#Ubuntu Linux (64-bit)#1#1024#GREEN#GREEN#2013-03-04T22:37:38CET#POWERED_ON#vm-83#host-28#192.168.1.150#4000#192.168.1.20#1#1#GREEN#TOOLS_OK#monitorbox#0#0#1799#1024#25415680#0#102#1036#413#413#999#23#Lab##24#00:50:56:be:42:8b
VMware vCenter Server Appliance#[LOCAL-2TB] VMware vCenter Server Appliance/VMware vCenter Server Appliance.vmx#SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (64-bit)#2#8192#GREEN#GREEN#2013-02-01T23:02:44CET#POWERED_ON#vm-34#host-28#192.168.1.150#4000#192.168.1.10#1#2#GREEN#TOOLS_OK#foonet#0#0#3598#8192#77316096#0#409#8237#143#125#8186#0#Lab##52#00:0c:29:65:9d:96

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).