Network counters for physical switches
A majority of VMware administrators do not monitor the physical network. The main reason is that their job scope and responsibility do not cover the physical network. This creates difficulty in network troubleshooting. At the minimum, you need to have visibility into the devices that are directly connected to the ESXi hosts.
Starting from December 2015, vRealize Operations provides this visibility. The metrics and configuration are collected by SNMP polling. Network devices themselves and topology are discovered with LLDP or CDP—protocols that need to be enabled on network devices. The following screenshot shows that it has discovered three switches using the SNMP V3 protocol:
Visibility into physical switches
If we expand the switch labeled Arista-Core, we will see its relationship with other switches. We can see that it is connecting to two other switches. We can expand the hierarchy further and see the relationship with the ESXi host. This gives...
