Using VMWare Discovery and Templates to Monitor Virtual Machines

[witt]

I decided to try out the VMWare template monitoring (before, I was installing Zabbix Agents on all VMs that were shot out to ESXi hypervisors).

After reading a couple of blog articles, I decided to add a host and configure it to consult vCenter using the VM VMWare template.

It synced in the Hypervisors, the VMs on each hypervisor, the clusters and datastores. Even set up the host groups and such.

Things I noticed in enabling this:

• In the default Global Dashboard, all VMWare hosts are shown as "Unknown" (grey box) in the Availability squares.
  • This seems to be because when you click on the gear, the gear is using Interface Type "Zabbix Agent" - and there is no Zabbix Agent with VMWare.
  • But what does one do in this situation? Having them all shown as Unknown in a grey box, as opposed to Available or Unavailable, looks awful.
• All of these VMs that VMWare pulled in, they use a uuid as the hostname, and the "hostname" is in the visible name field.
  • Can't change this! Doesn't look right, but I guess this is the way VMWare works?
• The fields are uneditable.
  • The hostname, visible name, groups, and interface(s) are all uneditable and greyed out.
  • I cannot add any additional Templates.

So with this background, the question:

If you run with these templates, are you hamstrung such that you cannot add more additional templates (to the VMs)? For example, if this VM is running Linux, you cannot use the OS Linux template? Or, if it is running some service (i.e. RabbitMQ), you cannot add a template for that?

What is the answer here? What do people do? Turn off the VMWare VM Discover and related templates and use Zabbix Agent on those, and only use the VMWare templates for hypervisors, clusters, datastores?

[Avinasha]

Install agent on it and create another host(Agent monitored) to do all the OS layer , application monitoring. In my environment, when I install agent I add domain name to the hostname because Zabbix doesnt allow you to have two nodes with same name.

[witt]

Thanks for the responses! So it is perfectly normal, then, to create two Zabbix hosts for that same VM, sounds like. One would have the uuid as the hostname, the other would have the true hostname (or ip) as the hostname.

One issue I have been having with the VMWare templates, is that the Trigger Actions don't seem to be firing. I am trying to send a slack notification when I get a trigger alert. Those were working with the agent (on discovery at least), but since I started using the VMWare templates, I have not seen any of the triggers firing.

But thanks for the response!

[cyber]

You have noticed all the correct things..
If host has not agent, you cannot show "available or not".
If host is created by discovery using a prototype, it is pretty natural, that you can not edit it, Next run of disco would create another one exactly according to prototype, right? That's the way of any discovered item.
If there is no agent, how would you expect those "other templates" to retrieve data?
Vmware monitoring gives you vmware view of things. If you need to look into those hosts, you better install the agent and use it..