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Disable Tags discovery in the VMware MP

Turn off discovery of vSphere Tags for ESXi hosts and VMs to reduce load and avoid discovery timeouts.

Applies to: OpsLogix VMware Management Pack 23.11.4096.0 and later · SCOM 2019, 2022, 2025 · vCenter 7.0, 8.0, 9.0
Last updated: October 2026 · Reading time: 3 minutes

Goal

Turn off the collection of vSphere tags for ESXi hosts and virtual machines, if you don't use tags in SCOM.

The VMware Management Pack stores the vSphere tags of each ESXi host and virtual machine in the Tags property of the object, so you can use them in SCOM groups. Retrieving tags can take a lot of time in large environments. To limit the impact, the collector stops retrieving tags after 5 minutes and logs a warning in the Operations Manager event log (source OpsLogix VMware Collector):

  • For ESXi hosts: Timeout occured while trying to retrieve tags for default object discovery, Skipping tags
  • For virtual machines: Timeout occurred while trying to retrieve tags for virtualmachines

If you see these warnings and don't use tags, turn tags off.

Before you start: when tags are off, the Tags property of hosts and VMs becomes empty at the next discovery. SCOM groups or overrides that select objects by tag then no longer match.

Prerequisites

  • VMware Management Pack 23.11.4096.0 or later.
  • Permission to create overrides, and an unsealed management pack to save them in.

Turn off tags for virtual machines

  1. In the Operations console, go to Authoring > Management Pack Objects > Object Discoveries and search for VMware Virtual Machine discovery.
  2. Right-click it and select Overrides > Override the Object Discovery > For all objects of class: VMware Datacenter.
  3. Select the PropertyPaths parameter and set its override value to: 
    <DataObjects><DataObject Type="VirtualMachine" DataCenterID="*" TaggingInfo="false" /></DataObjects>

    In other words: keep the default value and only change TaggingInfo="true" to TaggingInfo="false".

  4. Select your override management pack and click OK.

Turn off tags for ESXi hosts

Five discoveries share one data collection per vCenter (cookdown): VMware Cluster discovery, VMware Datastore discovery, VMware Distributed Virtual Switch, VMware ESX Host discovery and VMware Network discovery. Their PropertyPaths parameter is identical, and it's where the host tags are requested.

Override all five discoveries, with exactly the same value. If you override only the ESX Host discovery, the other four still request the tags, and SCOM runs a second, separate collection for the hosts. That increases the load instead of reducing it.

  1. For each of the five discoveries, select Overrides > Override the Object Discovery > For all objects of class: VMware Datacenter.
  2. Set PropertyPaths to: 
    <DataObjects><DataObject Type="HostSystem" DataCenterID="*" TaggingInfo="false"/><DataObject Type="VmwareDistributedVirtualSwitch" DataCenterID="*" /><DataObject Type="Network" DataCenterID="*" /><DataObject Type="ClusterComputeResource" DataCenterID="*" /><DataObject Type="Datastore" DataCenterID="*" /></DataObjects>

    This is the default value with only TaggingInfo="true" changed to TaggingInfo="false".

  3. Save all five overrides in the same override management pack.

Verify it worked

The change takes effect at the next discovery, about every 6 hours. Then check the Operations Manager event log on the servers in the VMware resource pool: the tag timeout warnings no longer appear, and the Tags property of hosts and VMs is empty.

To turn tags on again, delete the overrides.

See also