vSphere: omit objects by name

[kkruzich]

RE: vsphere plugin

I've followed some of the discussions stemming from #5165 and read through the docs on Metric Filtering yet I'm still not clear if there's any means of excluding objects by name. For example, in listing our datastores, I see the conventions below. I want to exclude all datastores that begin with Local*

Have I overlooked something or is it not currently possible to do this?

/datastore/e612af807be232cebab3cad7d1a0b568
/datastore/LocalStorage-USPDXESX363
/datastore/LocalStorage-USPDXESX017
/datastore/845bc80751cb34cf927700f7f616dad4
/datastore/Local-LGA-ESX038
/datastore/8e7804a1a5363272b001cd74f3223d1c
/datastore/d5573007bed737dd827991b7fa1d6d76

[danielnelson]

We do have the datastore_include = [] option but there is no converse option so it would be difficult to exclude items, especially since this option only supports * and ** wildcards. I believe you would need:

[[inputs.vsphere]]
  # ... snip ...
  [inputs.vsphere.tagdrop]
    dsname = ["Local*"]

@prydin , do you think it might be a good idea to add a datastore_exclude = []?

As an aside, I see there are some copy/paste typo's in the README and sample config around this option, so I'll fix those.

[prydin]

Unfortunately, an exclude function is a bit tricky to implement due to the way the APIs work. I will put that on my list of things to do, but it may take a while before I get to it.

To elaborate a bit: Excluding using full paths is a major change, but we could do a simple exclude on names only. The only issue I would have with that is that include and exclude would have different semantics.

[prydin]

I'm working on a solution to this one. Expect a PR within the next couple of weeks or so.