This is a community-maintained open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by VMware, Inc. or Broadcom Inc. "VMware" and "vSphere" are trademarks of Broadcom Inc.

Author: Wei Zhou, VMware by Broadcom — wei-wz.zhou@broadcom.com

If you discover a security vulnerability, please report it privately:

• Email: wei-wz.zhou@broadcom.com
• GitHub: Open a private security advisory

Do not open a public GitHub issue for security vulnerabilities.

• Passwords are stored exclusively in ~/.vmware-monitor/.env (never in config.yaml, never in code)
• .env file permissions are verified at startup (chmod 600 required)
• No credentials are logged, echoed, or included in audit entries
• Each vCenter/ESXi target uses a separate environment variable: VMWARE_<TARGET_NAME_UPPER>_PASSWORD

This skill is strictly non-destructive. No MCP tool or CLI command in the codebase can create, modify, delete, or power-cycle any vSphere object. All operations are read-only queries against the vSphere API. This is enforced at the code level — there are no write API calls to remove or bypass.

The background scanner (daemon start) is user-initiated only and is never auto-started during installation, import, or MCP server startup. The daemon runs in the foreground of the invoking terminal session and stops when the user terminates it.

• Webhooks are disabled by default
• When enabled, they send only to user-configured URLs (Slack, Discord, or custom HTTP endpoints)
• Each payload carries critical/warning counts plus every critical issue and every alarm/event warning from that scan — host-log warnings stay in the local scan log, and info rows are never sent
• Each issue carries the entity name and one of: the alarm name, vCenter event message (sanitized, ≤500 chars), ESXi log line matching critical/panic/corrupt (sanitized, ≤200 chars), or the error text for a target the daemon could not connect to
• That event, log, and error text can contain host names, IP addresses, and user names — treat the webhook destination as receiving operational data
• Payloads never contain credentials from the skill's config or .env

• TLS certificate verification is enabled by default
• verify_ssl: false exists solely for ESXi hosts using self-signed certificates in isolated lab/home environments
• In production, always use CA-signed certificates with full TLS verification

• vmware-policy is the only transitive dependency auto-installed; it provides the @vmware_tool decorator and audit logging
• All other dependencies are standard Python packages (pyVmomi, Click, Rich, APScheduler, python-dotenv)
• No post-install scripts or background services are started during installation

• All vSphere-sourced content (VM names, event messages, host logs) is processed through _sanitize()
• Sanitization truncates to 500 characters and strips C0/C1 control characters
• Output is wrapped in boundary markers ([VSPHERE_EVENT], [VSPHERE_HOST_LOG]) when consumed by LLM agents

This project is scanned with Bandit before every release, targeting 0 Medium+ issues:

uvx bandit -r vmware_monitor/