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Lenne
Asked: 2010-10-06 05:19:09 +0800 CST

Monitoring vmware with nagios

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I'd like some way to connect nagios, so it sees the status of the Virtual Center, i.e. if the infrastructure client shows an alarm, it is shown in nagios.

Not nessecary to show the errormessage, just nagios showing "Something wrong", so I can look at the Infrastructure client to see what's wrong.

Otherwise an error can be unnoticed for days, if nothing seems to be out of order, as I'm not looking at IC, while Nagios is running all the time (or actually a nagios-popup)

vmware-vcenter nagios

4 Answers

  1. I was looking for a good vCenter or even just ESX(i) check for Nagios a while back, and I didn't find anything. I ended up writing one-off scripts to cover the need, and I'm going to go back and improve them when I get a chance.

    There is this: http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Addons/Configuration/Configuration-Wizards/VMware-ESX--2F-vSphere--2F-vCenter-Monitoring-Wizard/details but I haven't tried it, as it's only compatible the commercial version of Nagios, Nagios XI.

    If you can script in perl, the VMware SDK is available here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/viperltoolkit/

    It should contain all of the functions necessary to do what you want (and then some).

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  2. Take a look at Netway's VMWare Plugin for Nagios. I don't think you can check VirtualCenter with it, but the ESX hosts and Guests work

    Since the release of VMware ESX Server 2.0, there is an alternative to server monitoring: the Common Interface API. Based on this API, we have developed a new Nagios plugin which can effortlessly query the global status of individual VMs. It does not need to be installed in each individual server VM, because the plugin independently reports on VMs including their Heartbeat status. When desired, CPU load, memory and disk utilisation along with other parameters can also be queried. The plugin is distributed with templates for NagiosGrapher, offering easy extrapolation of data into performance charts.

    You can find more about it here: http://www.netways.de/en/de/produkte/nagios_plugins/vmware_esx/

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  3. We use check_esx3 in conjunction with ESX server and standard nagios on Centos - it works well.

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  4. Since new versions of vmware old systems doesnt work (SNMP or running local commands inside ESX). There is no way to make it work with new API/Versions of Vmware, other monitoring systems (Zabbix, Pandora FMS, Open NMS) have the same problem, and the API is a hell :( I don't see any free plugin for ESX monitoring yet :(

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