vSphere Guest VM Data Separation - options for Grafana dashboards

Telegraf
1

I need to find a way to separate out my windows metrics from my Linux metrics for dashboards in Grafana. I have everything going into 1 metrics bucket with a 90d retention, because based on what I read, that is what I should do.

I have a linux.conf and a windows.conf file that gathers metrics inside the VMs like disk partitions that the vSphere plug-in would only get the entire disk.

Now I need to figure out how to make the Linux dashboards query only the Linux machines and the Windows to only query the Windows machines. Since the machines have different versions of the operating systems within the same family (rhel7, rhel8, rhel9, windows2019, windows 2022, etc) not sure if I could just make a variable within Grafana to query all the Linux type hosts and windows type hosts or create a tag in the telegraf conf files to identify the hosts.

As this is my first install not sure the best path…

2

Hi @c-stewa20,

Yes, structuring your data with tags for broad categories such as the OS is usually the preferred method. Since you have multiple operating system versions perhaps it would be beneficial to have 2 different tags, one for the OS, and one for the version (eg os=linux,version=rhel7 & os=windows,version=windows2019). This way you could easily filter on either and your host tag could still represent the individual servers independent of the OS & version (eg host=myserver01).

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3

@c-stewa20
Yes for example with telegraf:

For Linux (linux.conf):

[agent]
  # existing configurations

[global_tags]
  os = "linux"

For Windows (windows.conf):

[agent]
  # existing configurations

[global_tags]
  os = "windows"
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