In December 2021 we wrote VMware Monitoring: Why Opslogix is the right choice for you. At the time, vSphere 7 was new, Kubernetes was coming to vSphere, and the Log4j vulnerability was in the news. A lot has changed since then. vSphere 9 and SCOM 2025 are here, ransomware gangs now target ESXi hosts directly, and many organizations are reconsidering how they monitor their VMware estate.
What hasn't changed is our goal: to give SCOM teams reliable VMware monitoring that is simple to run, light on resources and fairly priced. This post covers what the Opslogix VMware Management Pack does today and why we think it is still the right choice.
The management pack is actively developed, with several releases a year. The latest release came out in October 2026. It supports:
The full list of changes for each release is in the VMware Management Pack release notes.
The core management pack discovers and monitors vCenter servers, datacenters, clusters, ESXi hosts, virtual machines, datastores, resource pools and networks, and brings vCenter alarms into SCOM as alerts. You can import additional management packs for the areas that matter to you:
| Management pack | What it adds |
|---|---|
| vSAN Monitoring | 57 vSAN Skyline Health checks as SCOM monitors, plus 40 performance rules. Disk groups and cache and capacity disks are discovered for vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA) clusters. |
| Ransomware Vulnerability Monitoring | Checks ESXi hosts, distributed switches and VMs against VMware's security hardening guidance. There are separate packs for vSphere 6.5, 6.7, 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0. The 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0 packs each have about 40 checks: account lockout, password history, forged transmits, MAC address changes, promiscuous mode and more. |
| Hardware Monitoring | ESXi hardware sensor health (CIM), with a small set and a full set to choose from. |
| Appliance Monitoring | Health and services of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), plus appliance network counters. |
| Guest Monitoring | Guest OS state and disk free space of your VMs through VMware Tools, without installing a SCOM agent in the guest. |
| Capacity Analysis | CPU, memory and datastore overcommitment for each cluster, with monitors and performance data for trend analysis. Dashboards are available in a separate pack. |
| Reports | Availability reports for vCenter, datacenters, clusters, hosts, VMs, datastores, networks and resource pools, plus Top-N and matrix reports of CPU, memory and datastore usage. |
Because each area is a separate management pack, you only import what you need. That keeps SCOM lean and reduces alert noise.
In recent years, ransomware groups have started to target the hypervisor itself. Encrypting one ESXi host takes down every VM on it. A host with weak account lockout settings or a switch that accepts forged transmits makes that easier.
The Ransomware Vulnerability management packs turn the hardening guidance for your vSphere version into SCOM monitors. Settings that drift from the recommended values show up next to your other alerts, so your operations team sees them. Each check can be turned off or tuned with standard SCOM overrides when your policy differs. See Ransomware vulnerability monitoring for details.
We designed the management pack to use as few resources as possible in both VMware and SCOM. That is still a priority:
To learn how the collector works and what it needs from your firewall, read The Opslogix VMware Collector explained.
The VMware MP Configuration dashboard in the SCOM console is where you add vCenter connections, set up the resource pool and assign licenses. Since release 26.10, the management pack can also assign available licenses to new ESXi hosts automatically and release the licenses of hosts that no longer exist. It never assigns more licenses than you own. For scripted setups, PowerShell cmdlets cover the same tasks.
You can exclude VMware objects from monitoring with filters, and you can choose which vCenter alarms become SCOM alerts. That way SCOM only alerts on things that need attention.
Many of the improvements in recent releases came straight from customers: correct multipath and standby mode status for hosts, VCSA health monitors, filters for the vCenter custom attributes that backup products change after each backup, and better alert descriptions. We review our knowledge base with every release, so the documentation matches the product.
The best way to compare VMware management packs is to run them against your own environment. Look at alert quality, how quickly new objects are discovered, the load on your management servers and how much tuning you need before the alerts are useful. We are happy to help you set up a trial and compare.
For more information about the VMware Management Pack, contact our sales team or download the White Paper and Datasheet.