vmware collected vms and vms with zabbix-agent

[arucard]

Hi,

i'm trying to implement vmware monitoring it looks very interesting but have problem which right now don't know how to solve. VMware collector registers hosts in Zabbix, but starting Zabbix Agent on this VM register another host with the same name. Can this two hosts be merged automatically when zabbix-agent starts?

regard,
a.

[DaLoZ]

I'm looking to achive the same thing.

Either have the same tiggers / alerts / graphs on vmware guest machines that we have with the agent or merge the vmware guest with the zabbix agent.

Example:

[cyber]

These are not same names. Zabbix is case sensitive, so case matters.
These represent 2 different views of same thing... one is vmware view, other "from inside". Seemingly similar metrics can be different from those viewpoints... And you probably cannot get lots of things through vmware, what you get through agent.
I have not used vmware side myself, so I don't have any good advice here... but maybe, if you try to name them same way, it wont add new host but uses existing one?

[DaLoZ]

Thanks for thinking along.

If I try to rename the zabbix agent display name I get the following error.



I then renamed it to a unique name and get the same error when I tried to name it back it's original name.

Too bad. I'll have to ditch the vmware guests then.

[dougbee]

Trying to figure this out as well. With Zabbix 6.2 and info regarding ZBXNEXT-2088 - the two can be merged. I've tested this in practice:

1. Use VMware FQDN template to discover VMware VMs, and this also assumes the FQDN is the hostname.
2. I installed an agent on a discovered VM and associated a Linux template with it, and indeed zabbix-agent OS data is merged with the main Discover VMware VMs FQDN host.
3. Unfortunately, we haven't implemented VMware guest discovery in production, so we have 1000s of zabbix-agent hosts, and from testing it looks like a new "Discover VMware VMs FQDN" won't get created if a zabbix-agent host already exists with the same name.

The only workaround I can think of is to modify the Host prototype such that the VMs get created with a modifier to the name, but unfortunately that's not a unified view of a host.

Any other ideas?