Documentation forServer & Application Monitor
Monitoring your applications and environment is a key capability of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly Hybrid Cloud Observability) and is available in the Essentials edition. Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is also available in a standalone module.

Monitor hardware health for VMware in SAM

You can poll VMware devices for hardware health data in two ways:

  • Through vCenter, using the VMware native API interface.
  • Directly by using the Computer Information Model (CIM) protocol.

When a scheduled Discovery of existing servers runs, SAM automatically collects data for any servers that support Hardware health monitoring, including VMware ESX and ESXi servers that were added to the SolarWinds Platform using CIM protocol via port 5989.

If SAM detects a hardware monitoring agent on a VMware host, the option to monitor hardware health appears when you click the List Resources link in the Management widget on the Node Details view, even if hardware data is already collected via vCenter using the VMware API. When this option appears for a VMware host, enabling it does not change the hardware polling method when Poll for VMware is also selected.

Open port 5989 to poll VMware servers using the CIM protocol.

If polling hosts though vCenter, you may not see the Hardware Health option listed when you click List Resources, as these nodes tend to be ICMP. This data is automatically collected by SAM, when available, through the VMware API. Make sure the vCenter Hardware Status plugin is enabled in vCenter so data is accessible through the VMware API.

To determine how a VMware node is currently polled, click Settings > Virtualization Settings > VMware Settings. Drill down into Polling Method options for the node, as shown here:

SAM and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) have similar requirements for basic Hardware Health monitoring. See Supported versions of VMware and Required permissions for VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix credentials.