# Collecting custom metrics for vsphere module?

**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/collecting-custom-metrics-for-vsphere-module/100278
**Category:** Beats
**Tags:** metricbeat
**Created:** [September 13, 2017, 4:39am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/collecting-custom-metrics-for-vsphere-module/100278 "2017-09-13T04:39:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![reymondk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/779978/32.png) [@reymondk](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/reymondk)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2017, 4:39am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/collecting-custom-metrics-for-vsphere-module/100278/1 "2017-09-13T04:39:27Z")

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Hi Everyone,

OS: CentOS 7.x  
Beat: Metricbeat  
Version: 6.0.0-beta2

can we customize the list of metric that we want to collect in the vsphere module? I'm not sure if that's the purpose of get\_custom\_fields in the config. I've tried to add new metric such as ballooning, but does not seem to work.

Also, the metric names listed in the fields.yml file seem different with the standard metric internal names that we see in vcenter.

Thanks

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### Author: ![andrewkroh](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/andrewkroh/32/3784_2.png) [@andrewkroh](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/andrewkroh)
#### Post date: [September 13, 2017, 2:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/collecting-custom-metrics-for-vsphere-module/100278/2 "2017-09-13T14:39:02Z")

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Could you please open an issue on GitHub for both of these issues. We can improve the documentation for the config options and make sure that the fields.yml is correct. It would really help if you could call out the fields that are different/missing.

From researching the `get_custom_fields` I believe that setting this to true causes the virtualmachine metricset to report all of the [custom attributes](https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc%2FGUID-25244732-D473-4857-A471-579257B6D95F.html) set on the virtual machine. Hopefully after opening the GH issue we can get confirmation from the original [author](https://github.com/elastic/beats/pull/4469) of the module. We might also want to consider renaming the config option to `virtualmachine.include_custom_attributes` to help clarify what metricset it affects and what it does.

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### Author: ![reymondk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/779978/32.png) [@reymondk](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/reymondk)
#### Post date: [September 14, 2017, 12:00am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/collecting-custom-metrics-for-vsphere-module/100278/3 "2017-09-14T00:00:31Z")

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Thanks @andrewkroh for pointing out that link on the custom attributes.  
Yeah, seems it is basically just "tagging" feature that you want to associate to either VM, host or global.

I'll open up issues for these in github.

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### Author: ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [October 12, 2017, 12:00am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/collecting-custom-metrics-for-vsphere-module/100278/4 "2017-10-12T00:00:31Z")

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