Improved VMWare Monitoring with VmBix

[Jason]

Are there templates for zabbix-2.4.X? On your website you only mention 3.X templates

[Jason]

I've sorted the template import issue, but the discovery seems to be failing. I'm seeing a lot of this in the vmbix log.
VmBix.java:2162] No vm named '564d445e-e86f-e73a-1bf4-00d797d5e3fb' found

I'm getting some data returned for the datastores and on the vcentre item itself.

[tatapoum]

Is the useuuid parameter set to "true" in /etc/vmbix/vmbix.conf ?
Can you query VmBix for this VM ? You can test it using :

zabbix_get -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12050 -k "vm.status[564d445e-e86f-e73a-1bf4-00d797d5e3fb]"

[Jason]

I get a value of 4 returned...

the useuuid was set to false. Changed it to true.

[tatapoum]

Restart the service after changing the value.
Get the vCenter SDK version :

zabbix_get -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12050 -k "about"

discover the VMs:

zabbix_get -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12050 -k "vm.discovery[*]"

and check a VM :

zabbix_get -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12050 -k "vm.powerstate[VMUUID]"

[Jason]

I think changing the useuuid has fixed it as I'm getting data returned now...

Looking good.

How does it pick up vmtools for centos7 that has open-vm-tools installed? ESX picks it up as foreign, but this says unsupported?

Also can we see the host memory in terms of active and consume etc just as we can for the virtuals?

I assume the user I connect to Vcenter with can be a read only user?

This is already looking much better than the inbuilt one!

[Jason]

It does pick up open-vm-tools. Just took a while.

[tatapoum]

For the ESX memory, you can add items for the esx.vms.* methods. See the Wiki : https://github.com/dav3860/vmbix/wiki

[Jason]

Hi,

I'm trying that, but it's returning small values that don't seem to match up with what I can see when i look at the host in vcenter.

i.e. on the ESXi host vmbix[esx.vms.memory,{HOST.HOST},active] is returning 7 MB when I can see that 15GB is active in vcenter.

[tatapoum]

Yes, there is a mistake in the documentation. This is the average (active|swapped|...) memory usage of the VMs running on the ESX host. It is a value in percent.
I'll update the docs.

[Jason]

Cheers... That makes more sense.

However, swapped is just returning a value of 0 rather than it's correct value.

Is it possible to get the absolute values?

[Jason]

I've removed the scaling, but the values I'm getting don't make sense.

My Host has 128GB of memory and looking in VCentre I see that (in K) I have 102867172 Consumed (the Used reports this as 98GB correctly) but esx.vms.memory consumed returns this as 51% rather than ~77

For active I'm getting 7% returned when there is 13836450K which equates to around 10%

The averages are pretty close to the latest on v center so i know they're not fluctuating...

[tatapoum]

Hum, what exact items would you be interested in ?

[Jason]

I'd like the absolute values of active and ballooned at least. Consumed, I think, is what is already reported as Used.

The percentages would be ok if I was sure they tied up with what the host itself is reporting. I'm not sure what has gone wrong there.

Jason

[tatapoum]

I see. The values you see in the VI client are performance counters. They are described here at the cluster/resource pool/ESX/VM level :

https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk41pubs/ApiReference/memory_counters.html

So VmBix is already able to collect these items using the *.counter methods. First, check the available memory perf counters for the ESX hosts :

zabbix_get -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12050 -k "esx.counter.list[ESXUUID]" | grep mem

You will get a list of performance counters. For example, the VI client exposes these items :

mem.granted.average
mem.swapused.average
mem.sharedcommon.average
mem.vmmemctl.average -> for the balloon memory
[...]

you can query these values with :

zabbix_get -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12050 -k "esx.counter[ESXUUID,mem.granted.average]"

or :

zabbix_get -s 127.0.0.1 -p 12050 -k "esx.counter[ESXUUID,mem.vmmemctl.average]"

By default, the values are aggregated with a 300s interval. You can change this in the configuration file with the "interval" parameter.