Monitoring VMware
by Andrea Vacche, Patrik Uytterhoeven, Rihards Olups
Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Table of Contents
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Zabbix: Enterprise Network Monitoring Made Easy
- Credits
- Preface
- I. Module 1
- 1. Getting Started with Zabbix
- The first steps in monitoring
- Zabbix features and architecture
- Installation
- Summary
- 2. Getting Your First Notification
- 3. Monitoring with Zabbix Agents and Basic Protocols
- 4. Monitoring SNMP Devices
- 5. Managing Hosts, Users, and Permissions
- 6. Detecting Problems with Triggers
- 7. Acting upon Monitored Conditions
- 8. Simplifying Complex Configurations with Templates
- 9. Visualizing Data with Graphs and Maps
- 10. Visualizing Data with Screens and Slideshows
- 11. Advanced Item Monitoring
- 12. Automating Configuration
- 13. Monitoring Web Pages
- 14. Monitoring Windows
- 15. High-Level Business Service Monitoring
- 16. Monitoring IPMI Devices
- 17. Monitoring Java Applications
- 18. Monitoring VMware
- 19. Using Proxies to Monitor Remote Locations
- 20. Encrypting Zabbix Traffic
- 21. Working Closely with Data
- 22. Zabbix Maintenance
- A. Troubleshooting
- B. Being Part of the Community
- 1. Getting Started with Zabbix
- II. Module 2
- 1. Zabbix Configuration
- 2. Getting Around in Zabbix
- 3. Groups, Users, and Permissions
- 4. Monitoring with Zabbix
- Introduction
- Active agents
- Passive agents
- Extending agents
- SNMP checks
- Internal checks
- Zabbix trapper
- IPMI checks
- JMX checks
- Aggregate checks
- External checks
- Database monitoring
- Checks with SSH
- Checks with Telnet
- Calculated checks
- Building web scenarios
- Monitoring web scenarios
- Some advanced monitoring tricks
- Autoinventory
- 5. Testing with Triggers in Zabbix
- 6. Working with Templates
- 7. Data Visualization and Reporting in Zabbix
- 8. Monitoring VMware and Proxies
- 9. Autodiscovery
- 10. Zabbix Maintenance and API
- C. Upgrading and Troubleshooting Zabbix
- III. Module 3
- 1. Deploying Zabbix
- 2. Distributed Monitoring
- 3. High Availability and Failover
- Understanding high availability
- Understanding the levels of IT service
- Some considerations about high availability
- Implementing high availability on a web server
- Configuring the Zabbix server for high availability
- Implementing high availability for a database
- Summary
- 4. Collecting Data
- 5. Visualizing Data
- 6. Managing Alerts
- 7. Managing Templates
- 8. Handling External Scripts
- 9. Extending Zabbix
- 10. Integrating Zabbix
- D. Bibliography
- Index
After you have configured VMware in Zabbix, you would obviously like to know how to monitor your infrastructure. Zabbix made this quite easy by providing standard templates and low-level discovery. If you would like to know more about low-level discovery, then have a look at Chapter 9, Autodiscovery.
To be able to successfully perform the steps in this recipe, you need to have a Zabbix server and a VMware server installed with some hosts already configured on the VMware server. You also need to have finished the previous recipe, Configuring Zabbix for VMware.
After we have configured Zabbix for VMware monitoring, the only thing we need to have is some patience. Next we go to Monitoring | Latest data and we select our VMware server from the list. After some time, Zabbix will start to fill in the data.
After waiting for the VMware discovery of our vCenter, Zabbix will start to populate the information of hypervisor and our virtual machines. Latest data grouped by hypervisor or cluster is as shown in the following screenshot:
Some details provided by Zabbix about a single virtual machine are seen in the following screenshot:
Once Zabbix is properly configured for VMware; it will access the VMware vCenter and read all information it needs from the SDK. Zabbix has some built-in templates that will be used to link automatically to the hypervisors and VMware guests.
Note that the
Template Virt VMware template should be used for VMware vCenter and Elastic Sky X (ESX) hypervisor monitoring. The Template Virt VMware Hypervisor and Template Virt VMware Guest templates are used by discovery and normally should not be manually linked to a host.
Note
One of the drawbacks is that Zabbix will create automatically a new guest for each VMware guest and link it to a VMware guest template. This means that if you have a Windows server or a Linux server as guest, then you still need to create a new guest and link it with the correct Linux or Windows templates. This means that each guest will be available twice in Zabbix which is not a proper solution.
There is also another option named vPoller; this is a community solution and is not supported by Zabbix SIA. It was developed as a solution when there was no support yet in Zabbix for VMware monitoring. Because it was developed by the community, it does certain things differently and it might be a better solution for you in certain cases.
|
Feature |
Zabbix with vPoller |
Stock Zabbix |
|---|---|---|
|
Discovery of vSphere objects |
Yes |
Yes |
|
VMware support built in Zabbix |
No |
Yes |
|
VMware data center support |
Yes |
No |
|
VMware clusters support |
Yes |
Yes |
|
VMware Hypervisors support |
Yes |
Yes |
|
VMware virtual Machine support |
Yes |
Yes |
|
VMware datastore support |
Yes |
Basic |
|
Is easy to extend |
Yes |
No |
|
Is scalable |
Yes |
Yes |
|
VMware monitoring with older Zabbix releases |
Yes |
No |
Note
vPoller can be found at http://unix-heaven.org/node/114.
Tip
If you would like to monitor Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) with Zabbix then you could make use of the implementation that was made by another community member. This implementation will auto-discover your KVM machines and add them into Zabbix: https://github.com/bushvin/zabbix-kvm-res.
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