How does the VMware Event Collector work ?

[Aron Campbell]

Hi Experts,

We are running VMware discovery nicely for multiple vcentre instances and aim to configure the event collector.

Before i do, can an expert please describe how the event collector works? 

Does it poll a particular API ? If so how regularly ?

Does it register to receive events, if so by what mechanism.

The vAPI's can get busy and the compute team want to know the details of the mechanism before going ahead.

As much technical detail as possible please.  The online documentation is quite light for some detail.

Kind Regards,

Aron

PS Currently on Orlando Patch 7.

[Aron Campbell]

Thanks everyone, the technical documentation is a bit light on how it works.  I'll be testing it so hope to learn more.

[Rahul Priyadars]

Discovery can also update the CMDB by detecting vCenter events through a MID Server extension called the vCenter event collector.  

The event collector allows the CMDB to be updated near real-time with changes to virtual machines (VMs), in addition to the updates detected by Discovery. A change to a VM, such as it being powered on or off is sent as an event from the vCenter server to the vCenter event collector. When the event is received, the CMDB is updated accordingly. In this case, full vCenter Discovery does not need to rerun in order to reflect the updated state of the VM. 

Docs URL- https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/task/t_Con...

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/concept/c_...

Hope This helps.

Regards

RP

[SNFan]

Could someone clarify - When a VmCreatedEvent / VmDeployedEvent is received - Does SN only poll VCenter and create the 'VMware Virtual Machine Instances' CI or does it run a 'Quick Discovery' against the actual VM and create the cmdb_ci_server CI?