Monitoring hardware RAID status with native VM monitoring features

[gmoynihan]

Hi,

This is my first post, but I have been a user and a fan Zabbix for a few years. I have recently updated our server to 2.2.1, and I have connected to my vCenter with the provided VMWare templates, the LLD is working. Overall, it is very sweet indeed.

Next, I would like to monitor the hardware raid status via Zabbix's native VMWare methods, in other words, not using VMBix, not java nor perl apis, and not IPMI.

All my hypervisors are ESXi 5.5, and 90% of my enterprise is on HP blades, 10% on Dell blades. I do have the requisite vendor driver image running, so VMWare is capable of polling the RAID controllers.

Has anyone done similar integration already, and willing to share a pointer or a template? Thanks in advance, it is much appreciated.

Warm regards,

--Greg

[steveboyson]

I'm afraid you can not get the requested infos from the zabbix-provided vSphere interface since it is somewhat limited.

There are some solutions using the Perl/Python SDK or WBEM monitoring (this is the only way since VMware dropped specific vendor SNMP support with vSphere 5.0).

[gmoynihan]

Ah, I see. Thank you very much for the reply.

[gavind]

By the way, has anyone tried out Python and see which one works here? So far, there are a lot of suggestions online but I just can't decide which one to go with.

[steveboyson]

We are using self-renewed versions of Dmitry Maksimo's scripts.

https://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15691

Both the python and the perl versions as they are covering different aspects as well as his WBEM based queries.

Also, in the "checkmk" package by Mathias Kettner there are the scripts "agent_vsphere" and "agent_vsphere.pysphere" which we are using.

We run them all from a VMA appliance. It queries the vcenter server, writes text files and scp's these file to our zabbix server. There we start the further processing via LLD rules.

Furthermore I wrote some scripts which are roughly based on the work done by William Lam found here (he is the author of the ghettoVCB* tools):

http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/

P.S: Finally some self-written scripts inspired by the Perl SDK to query VM Guest stats as well as some SNMP-based queries utilizing the remaining rest of what VMware left. Gives info about the running guest instances (memory, CPU, disk sizes, uptime, and so on) as well as self-written logfile parsers for VMware's VDP backup appliance to gather metrics about backup time, status and de-duplication efficiency.