VMware vSphere and MariaDB Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>The VMware vSphere Telegraf plugin provides a means to collect metrics from VMware vCenter servers, allowing for comprehensive monitoring and management of virtual resources in a vSphere environment.</p>

<p>This plugin writes metrics from Telegraf directly into MariaDB using parameterized SQL INSERT statements, offering a flexible way to store metrics in structured, relational tables.</p>

Integration details

VMware vSphere

<p>This plugin connects to VMware vSphere servers to gather a variety of metrics from virtual environments, enabling efficient monitoring and management of virtual resources. It interfaces with the vSphere API to collect statistics regarding clusters, hosts, resource pools, VMs, datastores, and vSAN entities, presenting them in a format suitable for analysis and visualization. The plugin is particularly valuable for administrators who manage VMware-based infrastructures, as it helps to track system performance, resource usage, and operational issues in real-time. By aggregating data from multiple sources, the plugin empowers users with insights that facilitate informed decision-making regarding resource allocation, troubleshooting, and ensuring optimal system performance. Additionally, the support for secret-store integration allows secure handling of sensitive credentials, promoting best practices in security and compliance assessments.</p>

MariaDB

<p>The SQL output plugin in Telegraf enables direct writing of metrics into SQL-compatible databases like MariaDB by executing parameterized SQL statements. With support for the MySQL driver, the plugin seamlessly integrates with MariaDB for reliable, structured metric storage. This setup is ideal for users who prefer SQL-based analytics or want to store metrics alongside business data for unified querying. MariaDB is a community-developed, enterprise-grade fork of MySQL that emphasizes performance, security, and openness. The plugin supports inserting time series metrics into custom schemas, enabling flexible analytics and integrations with BI tools like Metabase or Grafana using SQL connectors.</p>

Configuration

VMware vSphere

MariaDB

Input and output integration examples

VMware vSphere

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Dynamic Resource Allocation</strong>: Utilize this plugin to monitor resource usage across a fleet of VMs and automatically adjust resource allocations based on performance metrics. This scenario could involve triggering scaling actions in real time based on CPU and memory usage metrics collected from the vSphere API, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Capacity Planning and Forecasting</strong>: Leverage the historical metrics gathered from vSphere to conduct capacity planning. Analyzing the trends of CPU, memory, and storage usage over time helps administrators anticipate when additional resources will be needed, avoiding outages and ensuring that the virtual infrastructure can handle growth.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Automated Alerting and Incident Response</strong>: Integrate this plugin with alerting tools to set up automated notifications based on the metrics gathered. For example, if the CPU usage on a host exceeds a specified threshold, it could trigger alerts and automatically initiate predefined remediation steps, such as migrating VMs to less utilized hosts.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Performance Benchmarking Across Clusters</strong>: Use the metrics collected to compare the performance of clusters in different vCenters. This benchmarking provides insights into which cluster configurations yield the best resource efficiency and can guide future infrastructure enhancements.</p> </li> </ol>

MariaDB

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Business Intelligence Integration</strong>: Store application performance metrics directly into MariaDB and connect it to BI tools like Metabase or Apache Superset. This setup allows blending of operational data with business KPIs for unified dashboards, enhancing visibility across departments.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Compliance Reporting with Historical Metrics</strong>: Use this plugin to log metrics into MariaDB for audit and compliance use cases. The relational model enables precise querying of past performance indicators with timestamped entries, supporting regulatory documentation.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Custom Alerting Based on SQL Logic</strong>: Insert metrics into MariaDB and use custom SQL queries to define alert thresholds or conditions. Combined with cron jobs or scheduled scripts, this enables advanced alerting workflows not possible with traditional metric platforms.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>IoT Sensor Metrics Storage</strong>: Collect sensor data from IoT devices via Telegraf and store it in MariaDB using a normalized schema. This approach is cost-effective and integrates well with existing SQL-based systems for real-time or historical analysis.</p> </li> </ol>

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