Vsphere module delivers inaccurate data

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Hello everyone!

I am fetching vsphere metrics from 2 different vsphere hosts, containing 5 different datacenter.

- module: vsphere
  metricsets: ["host" , "virtualmachine"]
  period: 10s
  hosts: ["https://vcenter.host/sdk"]
  username: "elkmonitor"
  password: "**********"
  insecure: true
 fields:
    environment: hq

While this works pretty well, I discovered that some, not all, of my virtual machines change their recorded datacenter within the 10 seconds polling period.

vsphere.virtualmachine.name.keyword: host0123.my.domain.com
vsphere.virtualmachine.datacenter.keyword: Datacenter_A

turns into

vsphere.virtualmachine.name.keyword: host0123.my.domain.com
vsphere.virtualmachine.datacenter.keyword: Datacenter_B

and back with the next poll. I can assure you there is no vmotion going on in between. The VMs are not duplicate.
This applies to the virtualmachine metricset, host metricset is not affected, for the datastore metricset I cannot tell as we have the duplicate datastore names within the datacenters.

We are using vsphere Version 6.5.0 Build 4602587.
Metricbeat is running with version 6.0.1

Has anybody seen something like this before?

2

There were recently quite some large changes to the vsphere module like https://github.com/elastic/beats/pull/4883 to fix some other issues. I wonder if this change potentially also fixed the problem above? This change did not make it into 6.1 but will be in 6.2 and is in master. Any chance you could try a snapshot build of metricbeat?

3

Hi!

If you provide me a snapshot build (deb64 is preferred), I will be happy to try it!
Sorry for the delay, was not on the topic a few days!

4

@Robert_Schultz Here you go: https://beats-package-snapshots.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?prefix=metricbeat/

5

Well, that kind of solved the problem, as the field "vsphere.virtualmachine.datacenter.keyword" has vanished :slight_smile:

I was interested in aggregated vsphere cluster statistics, the "datacenter" value was not what I actually needed, but I guess I can work with filters now :smiley:

Thanks for the snapshot, this works for me now, at least I don't see inaccurate information currently.

6

Good to hear and thanks for testing. If you miss some fields, best open a feature request on Github.