Anytime that you a large environment, gathering metrics in any form can be daunting and cumbersome. Using scripting languages can usually greatly improve the efficiency of this process as well as be more accurate. Whether it’s VMWare, SQL Server, or some other platform, it would behoove you to see what scripting languages it may support.
In a recent case, I had to gather some metrics from a VMWare implementation. The environment had multiple hosts and each host had multiple virtual machines within them. I needed to gather metadata about each virtual machine on certain hosts. I was looking data like: