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We have a mixture of managed and unmanaged VMs within out VMware platform, For our managed VMs we use SNMP within the VM to graph the VM's network traffic which we then use for billing if the customer is over their limit. For our unmanaged VMs we once the VM is handed over the customer we are unable to graph the traffic usage as most customers will lock down the VM using a firewall and/or will disable/remove services which they don't need or want running.

Is there away to graph the traffic usage a VM's NIC within VMware vCenter which can be used for billing purposes?
Ideally we would like to be able import them to Observium so we can add them to the Observium traffic counting for billing.

I have looked at both Cacti and Observium and haven't found anything which will do this, ideally it would have been nice if the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch supported SNMP, Then we could graph the ports of the virtual switch.

I am guessing it would need something to pull the data from the VMware API and present it in to the right format for the graphing application. I might be able cobble something together, however I would rather not reinvent the wheel if someone has done this before.

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As far as I know you can get Layer 2 networking information via SNMP from ESXi: Understanding Layer 2 networking as reported by VMware ESXi SNMP You have to query the host (management address). I don't know if you get all the information you need for your billing, though. Just give it a try.

Distributed Switches also support NetFlow. Together with a NetFlow collector you might get enough information for your billing.

Hope that helps.

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  • I will take a look again at SNMP to the host, I did add a host into Observium and it wasn't showing up any VM NICs, It did show a vSwitch but didn't show it doing any traffic or show any VM NICs. If It does work then I would need to work out away of tracking the VM as DRS moves them between the hosts.
    – Epaphus
    Jun 26, 2015 at 8:43

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