For Auvik to properly monitor your VMware ESXi hypervisor, you must either manually classify the ESXi host as a hypervisor in Auvik or enable SNMP for Auvik to automatically classify it.

To manually reclassify the hypervisor, see How do I edit device details? and select Hypervisor as the device type. Once you correctly classify the hypervisor, add your VMware credentials into Auvik.

To enable SNMP on your ESXi hypervisor, follow the steps below.

How to enable SNMP on an ESXi hypervisor

SNMP can be fully configured on an ESXi hypervisor through the ESX CLI. The commands vary between different versions of ESXi.

To gather more valuable and accurate data from your virtual environment, we highly recommended you have VMware Tools installed on each virtual machine.

How to enable SNMP on ESXi 6.x

  1. SSH or Telnet to your ESXi node using root-level credentials.
  2. Execute the following commands. Replace YOUR_STRING with your desired community string.
    esxcli system snmp set -r
    esxcli system snmp set -c YOUR_STRING
    esxcli system snmp set -p 161
    esxcli system snmp set -L "City, State, Country"
    esxcli system snmp set -C noc@example.com
    esxcli system snmp set -e yes
  3. If you selected a community string other than public or private, enter that string into Auvik by following these steps.
  4. If in Step 2 you chose to “Apply these credentials to all devices we discover that meet the criteria below” ensure that:
    1. Device Type = All Device Types
    2. Vendor = All Vendors

You’re all done! Your VMware hypervisors will now be discovered by Auvik. If you haven’t already done so, you should now add your VMware credentials for your VMware hypervisors and hosts.

How to enable SNMP on ESXi 7.x

  1. SSH or Telnet to your ESXi node using root-level credentials.
  2. Execute the following commands. Replace YOUR_STRING with your desired community string.
    esxcli system snmp set --communities YOUR_COMMUNITY_STRING
    esxcli system snmp set --enable true
  3. If you selected a community string other than public or private, enter that string into Auvik by following these steps.
  4. If in Step 2 you chose to “Apply these credentials to all devices we discover that meet the criteria below” ensure that:
    1. Device Type = All Device Types
    2. Vendor = All Vendors

You’re all done! Your VMware hypervisors will now be discovered by Auvik. If you haven’t already done so, you should now add your VMware credentials for your VMware hypervisors and hosts.