Excluding VMware VMs from instance discovery

Good afternoon @Dave Lee,

While our enhanced netscan script for adding VMWare resources allows you to leverage several filters to exclude VM’s and other components, the datasources for various VMWare resources do not currently include native filtering.

With that said, there are two approaches you could take to automate how instances are handled.

The first would be as you suggested, modifying the Active Discovery script to pull tags or other items you wish to key off of, then configuring Active Discovery Filters to exclude instances based off of the data.

Alternatively, you can configure your alert rules to only match, or exclude, particular instances for these modules, routing some but not others.

This is how i handle that kind of filtering using a property. 

This is how i handle that kind of filtering using a property. 

Love to see my stuff in action.

I realised that I needed to put the customproperty esx.tags=true on the vCenter Server, for the Active Discovery script to return the tags on each VM.  That’s working now.

I’m trying to understand how to best use the Active Discovery Filters.  Ideally I want to exclude any instance that has the tag “exclude” in the “monitoring” category.  This comes through in the properties as

auto.monitoring:exclude;

I’ve setup the filter as follows:

Which excludes the instance that I’ve put the tag on, but also includes all other instances.  It seems that, if the instance doesn’t have an “auto.monitoring” property, then it gets filtered out as well.

The following does work, but I think this will exclude an instance that has ANY value for auto.monitoring - so if a VM has other tags in the “monitoring” category then it will get filtered out.

Is there any way to set the Auto Discovery Filter so that it only returns items where “auto.monitoring” is not “exclude” but allows any that have to “auto.monitoring” property set at all?

Dave

Not currently. That’s the feed request: make it implied on all datasources. Please submit it through your portal.

I would think that would work if createDate is an attribute of the vmConfig object. I’d have to dig into the code specifics to do that, but I usually charge for that:

Stuart Weenig, Ninja Jedi | Community (logicmonitor.com)

Yessss i Love your work :) Totally a Fan! hehehehe i should have put a mention to you in it sorry for that. BTW i use your filtering theory across many datasources so thank you for that ❤

You’re totally welcome to it. More than once, I’ve put in a feed that all DSs have implied logic for applies to and discovery filters.

Imagine you could exclude a DS from a device simply by adding `<dsname>.disable` as a property and not having to modify the AppliesTo. Imagine you could disable at a group level, then enable on a few devices in the group. When you combine implied logic in the appliesto/discovery filters, things could get really powerful.

submitted