Using vmware-monitor with Continue

April 29, 2026 · View on GitHub

Continue is an open-source AI code assistant for VS Code and JetBrains. This guide shows how to add vmware-monitor as an MCP server for safe, read-only VMware monitoring.

Code-level safety: vmware-monitor contains zero destructive code — no risk of accidental changes to your infrastructure.

Prerequisites

Install vmware-monitor
```
uv tool install vmware-monitor
```

Configure credentials

mkdir -p ~/.vmware-monitor
cat > ~/.vmware-monitor/config.yaml << 'EOF'
targets:
  my-vcenter:
    host: vcenter.example.com
    username: readonly-user@vsphere.local
    password_env: VMWARE_MONITOR_PASSWORD
    verify_ssl: false
EOF

echo "VMWARE_MONITOR_PASSWORD=your_password" > ~/.vmware-monitor/.env
chmod 600 ~/.vmware-monitor/.env

Verify setup
```
vmware-monitor doctor
```

Adding to Continue

Add to ~/.continue/config.yaml:

mcpServers:
  - name: vmware-monitor
    command: vmware-monitor
    args:
      - mcp
    env:
      VMWARE_MONITOR_CONFIG: ~/.vmware-monitor/config.yaml

Requires uv tool install vmware-monitor (v1.5.15+). A ready-to-use template is available at examples/mcp-configs/continue.yaml.

With Ollama (Local Model)

# ~/.continue/config.yaml
models:
  - title: Qwen2.5 32B (local)
    provider: ollama
    model: qwen2.5:32b

mcpServers:
  - name: vmware-monitor
    command: vmware-monitor
    args: [mcp]
    env:
      VMWARE_MONITOR_CONFIG: ~/.vmware-monitor/config.yaml

Available MCP Tools (7 read-only tools)

Tool	Description
`list_virtual_machines`	List VMs with power state, CPU, RAM, IP. Supports `limit`, `sort_by`, `power_state`, `fields`
`list_esxi_hosts`	List hosts with CPU cores, memory, ESXi version, uptime
`list_all_datastores`	List datastores with capacity, free space, type
`list_all_clusters`	List clusters with host count, DRS/HA status
`get_alarms`	Get active alarms with severity and description
`get_events`	Get recent vCenter/ESXi events
`vm_info`	Get detailed VM info including snapshot list

All tools accept an optional target parameter to switch between environments.

Usage Examples

Example 1: Quick cluster status while coding

You: @vmware-monitor How many VMs are running on each host?

Continue: [calls list_esxi_hosts]
esxi-01: 12 VMs (CPU 42%, RAM 67%)
esxi-02: 10 VMs (CPU 38%, RAM 71%)
esxi-03: 14 VMs (CPU 88%, RAM 94%) ← overloaded

Example 2: Check VM before deploying code

You: @vmware-monitor Is vm-staging healthy? Enough disk?

Continue: [calls vm_info]
vm-staging: ON | 8 vCPU | 16GB RAM (11.2GB used, 70%)
Datastore: ssd-ds01 — 450GB free ✓
No active alarms ✓

Example 3: Audit recent changes

You: @vmware-monitor Show events from the last hour

Continue: [calls get_events]
14:52 - vm-prod-web01 vMotion to esxi-02 (DRS rebalance)
14:38 - Snapshot created: vm-db-01/pre-maintenance
14:15 - vm-temp-test powered off by devops@company.com