Configuring Zabbix for 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
When we talk about virtualization, there are many solutions in the market these days. The biggest player is still VMware, and Zabbix made it much easier for us to monitor our VMware infrastructure. In this recipe, we will show you how to set up VMware monitoring in Zabbix.
For this recipe to work, we need of course, a Zabbix server with the necessary admin rights and of course a VMware server that we can monitor. VMware monitoring is available since Zabbix 2.2. The minimum required version of VMware vCenter or vSphere is 4.1.
If you compile Zabbix, then make sure that you compile it with the --with-libxml2 and --with-libcurl options, else VMware monitoring will not work.
- Since we make use of the packages, the only thing we have to do first is to enable the following options in the
zabbix_server.conffile:StartVMwareCollectors = 1VMwareCacheSize = 8MVMwareFrequency = 60
- Make sure you restart the Zabbix server after changes have been made to the
zabbix_server.conffile. - Next, we create a new host for our vCenter in Zabbix under Configuration | Hosts, just like we would with any other server.
- When our host is added, we have to link it to the correct template. Zabbix provides for this with a pre-made template named
Template Virt VMware:
- Next we have to add some credentials. Zabbix needs a VMware account that has access to the API. Under Configuration | Hosts, there is a tab Macros where we have to create 3 macros. First is
{$PASSWORD}, we also need to add{$USERNAME}and{$URL}.
The username and password are obvious. For the {$URL} field, we need to add the URL to the vCenter API; this should be https://MyVcenter/sdk where MyVcenter is the DNS name or even better the IP to your vCenter.
Zabbix comes with some ready-made templates to monitor our VMware server. The only thing we need to do is provide Zabbix with the needed credentials such as the username, password, and the proper link to the SDK from our VMware server. It would be best if the account that we use here is an account that is only available for Zabbix as the credentials are easy to read by anyone with Zabbix administration rights.
If the user is in a Windows domain, you need to define the macro {$USERNAME} such as this: MYDomainSomeUser.
-
No Comment