Nagios monitoring for VMware Infrastructure 3 and ESX Server

The latest buzz word ‘Virtualisation’ is synonymous to that other popular term ‘cost reduction’, for its ability to save on physical machines and hence materials, power, cooling and its management. Many Virtualisation products are based on VMware. Infrastructure 3 is VMware’s professional solution for data centers, with various management tools including ESX.

There are several ways to integrate ESX Server and the free ESXi version into the monitoring system, such as through SNMP queries. Unfortunately SNMP in practice is error prone, as the OIDs change with each version and can sometimes also return other values. Moreover, Nagios integration is very complicated as each VM in Nagios must be individually set up.

Monitoring via Common Interface API

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.

Download and Installation You can download the plugin at our community site, netways.org. To install, simply copy the plugin into the directory where you store your Nagios plugins and set the rights accordingly:  Download Plugin

Support Should you have any problems with installation or operation, want to offer suggestions, or actively support its further development, please visit our community area:   Bug and Issue Tracker Should your company or organisation require further assistance, NETWAYS also offers professional services in support of this and many other Nagios plugins. We are happy to  support your monitoring project for example, with: Installation and implementation of Nagios and plugins on site at your office Programming of new Nagios plugins Connection to existing Nagios environments Professional support and 24x7 support contracts For more information please feel free to contact us.

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