Monitor Vmware ESX

vladi · Post by **vladi** » Sat Apr 10, 2004 4:15 pm

hi all,
Does somebody try to use cacti for VMware ESX
i have the mibs, but i can not to create any monitor
some help please

10x

vladi
vladi@we-can.co.il

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Nov 15, 2004 5:25 pm

playing with it now, let you know how it works out

JosephA · Post by **JosephA** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 5:51 pm

Replying to a rather old post, but in case anybody else is wondering...

The console OS for ESX is Linux at the moment, so you can monitor the ESX server just like you would any Linux server. By default snmpd is not running, so you will have to enable that and you should be good to go.

Hannu Liljemark · Post by **Hannu Liljemark** » Sun May 22, 2005 7:15 am

here's something i made for vmware esx. it's a host template that includes some ucd/net snmp and generic stuff, but also things you can get from the VMWARE agent extensions.

perhaps you want to try the template on some test system... works fine for me but I don't give any guarantees. import the host template into cacti (i'm using 0.8.6d for this), drop the vmware_*.xml into your resource/script_queries directory and the php files into scripts directory.

there's graphs for each virtual machine's memUtil, cpuUtil, networking (packets and traffic) and disk (read/write operations and amount of bytes read/written). any improvements are welcome. especially the php scripts are pretty ugly... probably because i've never written php before.

don't forget the configure snmp in vmware. enable it from the web browser gui and make further configuration in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf just like you do in any ucd-snmp/net-snmp system.

Hannu Liljemark · Post by **Hannu Liljemark** » Sun May 22, 2005 7:18 am

here's a few more screenshots

ajeskey · Post by **ajeskey** » Mon May 23, 2005 8:24 am

ah neat this saves me a bit of time. I just found the MIB's last night and was going to work on this today.

Just one suggestion on the memory part, maybe doing an inverse stack on the free memory so that it comes from the top down and not bottom up, would help to be a bit more descriptive.

Hannu Liljemark · Post by **Hannu Liljemark** » Tue May 24, 2005 3:13 am

the php scripts could use some work, there's way too much snmp queries being done. looking at other scripts they seem to do some fetches from the database and cache stuff - maybe that'd be a good idea. and instead of script query i guess they should be redone for the script server thing in 0.8.6.

i have no idea how well the graphing will work when you e.g. shutdown all virtual machine and restart them in another order than when you initially created the graphs. it's kinda messy figuring out which cpu, memory, disk and nic in the RESOURCE mib belongs to which VM in INFO mib. i'm not completely sure how the indexing should be done. virtual machine can be down and then it won't have anything in the RESOURCE mib and machines can have more than one disk, nic and cpu, i guess.

i haven't tested with two cpu systems. all the VMs here are single cpu.

that reversed memory is a good idea, but i couldn't figure out how to do it.

ajeskey · Post by **ajeskey** » Tue May 24, 2005 8:37 am

I am noticing that their poll-ability does suck. Each index should have a reference to the Virtual Machine, that right there would make things a lot smoother. It seems silly that a company that really bases their product off of scalability and consolidation (both things that really need to have well defined monitoring to know) has such a poor implementation of their monitoring.

I’ll email my contacts over at VMWare and see what their plans are for upcoming versions. If I hear anything I’ll let you know.

As for now, I am not even going to bother with this, not that my Virtual Servers reboot but the machines do, and if that causes an enumeration, what’s the point of graphing?

ajeskey · Post by **ajeskey** » Tue Jun 21, 2005 8:26 am

I think I have found away around the difficulties of losing the machine index when the VM PID changes

Table .1.3.6.1.4.1.6876.2.1.1
VM ID .1.3.6.1.4.1.6876.2.1.1.1
VM Name .1.3.6.1.4.1.6876.2.1.1.2

If you did something like BSOD2600 is doing in his Win32 Process monitor ( http://forums.cacti.net/viewtopic.php?t=6661 ) to base the indexing on the name, you could relate that back to the VM PID.

Just a thought.

laffen · Post by **laffen** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 3:03 pm

Hi,

has anyone played more with templates for the ESX server?

titan · Post by **titan** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 6:07 pm

I too am very interested in monitoring our ESX servers.

I'm quite happy to pay for someone's time if need be. I'm a cacti noobie so haven't a clue on how to create the required entries for a set of graphs based on new OIDS.

bpowers7 · Post by **bpowers7** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 10:37 am

how can I get the graphs to post the virtual server name instead of the 'vmIDX'?

ymartin59 · Post by **ymartin59** » Tue Nov 07, 2006 9:38 am

Hello,
After a upgrade from Debian cacti 0.8.6c to current 0.8.6i, I'm now able to test that ESX template.
I have first updated scripts to use new 0.8.6i SNMP authentication string parsing - because I use snmp v3 ! I will post the result of my work when satisfied.

ymartin59 · Post by **ymartin59** » Thu Nov 09, 2006 10:22 am

After investigation, available information through ESX SNMP is really poor compared to what vmkusage/vmktree collects - especialy for memory usage and CPU.

By the way, I updated the template:
- use script server method
- include ESX reserved console memory
- use VM display name as key order for CPU and Memory
- create a virtual reference (vmDisplayName/hwname) as key order for disk and NIC
- improve graph titles and data source names

I still have doubts about graph units for VM NIC traffic (kb/sec or bits/sec)
and for CPU ?? I kept the original unit/legend from the previous template.
Let me know if that is wrong.

--
Update: I have found that the "ESX Memory Usage" graph is buggy concerning the "GPRINT" legends. I will post an update next week after I check the units

fmangeant · Post by **fmangeant** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 10:09 am

Hi

thanks for these new templates !

However, here's what I get when I try to import them :

Round Robin Archive
[success] Daily (5 Minute Average) [update]
[success] Weekly (30 Minute Average) [update]
[success] Monthly (2 Hour Average) [update]
[success] Yearly (1 Day Average) [update]

CDEF
[success] Total All Data Sources [update]
[success] Multiply by 1024 [update]
[success] Turn Bytes into Bits [update]
[success] Total All Data Sources, Multiply by 1024 [update]
[success] Turn kilobytes into bits [update]

GPRINT Preset
[success] Normal [update]
[success] Load Average [update]
[success] Exact Numbers [update]

Data Input Method
[success] Get SNMP Data [update]
[success] Get SNMP Data (Indexed) [update]
[success] Get Script Server Data (Indexed) [update]

Data Template
[success] ucd/net - CPU Usage - System [update]
[success] ucd/net - CPU Usage - User [update]
[success] ucd/net - CPU Usage - Nice [update]
[success] ucd/net - Load Average - 1 Minute [update]
[success] ucd/net - Load Average - 5 Minute [update]
[success] ucd/net - Load Average - 15 Minute [update]
[success] Host MIB - Logged in Users [update]
[success] Host MIB - Processes [update]
[success] VMware ESX - ESX Memory - Total [update]
[success] VMware ESX - ESX Memory - Free [new]
[success] VMware ESX - ESX Memory - Console [new]
[success] Interface - Traffic [update]
[success] Interface - Errors/Discards [update]
[success] Interface - Unicast Packets [update]
[success] Interface - Non-Unicast Packets [update]
[success] ucd/net - Hard Drive Space [update]
[success] Host MIB - Hard Drive Space [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM CPU usage [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM NIC packets [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM NIC traffic [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM disk read/write operations [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM disk read/write (kB) [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM memory usage [update]

Graph Template
[success] ucd/net - CPU Usage [update]
[success] ucd/net - Load Average [update]
[success] Host MIB - Logged in Users [update]
[success] Host MIB - Processes [update]
[success] VMware ESX - ESX Memory Usage [update]
+ Found Dependency: (Data Template Item) esx_mem_total
+ Found Dependency: (CDEF) Multiply by 1024
+ Found Dependency: (GPRINT Preset) Normal
+ Found Dependency: (Data Template Item) esx_mem_cos
+ Found Dependency: (Data Template Item) esx_mem_free
+ Unmet Dependency: (Data Template Item)
+ Unmet Dependency: (Data Template Item)
[success] Interface - Traffic (bits/sec) [update]
[success] Interface - Errors/Discards [update]
[success] Interface - Unicast Packets [update]
[success] Interface - Non-Unicast Packets [update]
[success] Interface - Traffic (bytes/sec) [update]
[success] Interface - Traffic (bits/sec, 95th Percentile) [update]
[success] Interface - Traffic (bits/sec, Total Bandwidth) [update]
[success] Interface - Traffic (bytes/sec, Total Bandwidth) [update]
[success] ucd/net - Available Disk Space [update]
[success] Host MIB - Available Disk Space [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM CPU usage [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM NIC packets [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM NIC traffic (bits/sec) [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM disk read/write operations [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM disk read/write (kB) [update]
[success] VMware ESX - VM memory usage [update]

Data Query
[success] SNMP - Interface Statistics [update]
[success] ucd/net - Get Monitored Partitions [update]
[success] SNMP - Get Mounted Partitions [update]
[success] VMware ESX - Get VM CPU usage [update]
[success] VMware ESX - Get VM NIC statistics [update]
[success] VMware ESX - Get VM disk statistics [update]
[success] VMware ESX - Get VM memory usage [update]

Host Template
[success] VMware ESX server [update]

Cacti