VMware connected but no assets added

[ics]

Hi,

We're testing the zabbix 5.4 appliance here. The config is pretty fresh. I added 1 discovery rule and 3 discovery actions. I added authentication over LDAP, but that's about it. Now we're trying to monitor our VMs (and other VMware infra if possible) and that's where it doesn't go as expected.

I did connect Zabbix to our vmware environment. In the log files I do see every minute or so it connects and updates. I see names of our datastores in the logs, I see VirtualMachine id:vm-123456. So it definitely connect, updates a lot of stuff. But nothing appears in zabbix infrastructure. We've got around 110 VM's spread over 5 ESXi hosts with around 20 datastores roughly speaking.

I read that it takes a while before zabbix adds assests to its infrastructure but it's been almost 24 hours now. It feels more to me like something's missing in the config.

The only error I found in /var/log/zabbix_server.log is this. This seems to be a known bug so I guess not related to my problem, although worth mentioning I thought.
[CODE]
15328:20211201:131836.593 Error of query maxQueryMetrics: 'config.vpxd.stats.maxQueryMetrics' is invalid or exceeds the maximum number of characters permitted..
[CODE]

15328:20211201:131119.722 End of vmware_service_update():SUCCEED processed:204800 bytes of data. Events:0 DC:1 DS:38 CL:1 HV:4 VM:95 VMwareCache memory usage (free/strpool/total): 65441816 / 201176 / 67108048
15328:20211201:131119.722 zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 2, removed 0 VMware services in 3.237355 sec, idle 5 sec]'
15328:20211201:131124.726 zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 2, removed 0 VMware services in 3.237355 sec, querying VMware services]'
15328:20211201:131124.726 zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000085 sec, idle 5 sec]'
15328:20211201:131129.727 zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000085 sec, querying VMware services]'
15328:20211201:131129.727 zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000091 sec, idle 5 sec]'
15328:20211201:131134.730 zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000091 sec, querying VMware services]'
15328:20211201:131134.730 zbx_setproctitle() title:'vmware collector #1 [updated 0, removed 0 VMware services in 0.000088 sec, idle 5 sec]'

[tim.mooney]

Hi,

We're testing the zabbix 5.4 appliance here.

If you look around these forums and search for other people using the VM, you'll find quite a lot of people that assumed the VM was similar to "appliances" from other vendors: something you could deploy and use in an enterprise environment.

From what I can tell, that's not what the Zabbix developers truly intend that VM to be. It's sized for a very small environment (like a small home lab, with data collection for only a few hosts), and seems to be more of a way for people to get started with Zabbix and learn it. It's almost like a "training" environment. My impression is (and this is just my thoughts, I could be completely wrong) they want you to be able to easily try out Zabbix and experience all its features, but if you like it and want to use it in more than a "toy" environment, you should deploy using other methods.

Now you could assign a bunch more resources to it (more RAM, more vCPUs, grow the disk space greatly) and potentially use it to monitor a larger enterprise, but I don't think that's what the Zabbix developers are expecting. Again, this is just my impression.

I'm not trying to steer you away from Zabbix, just make sure you don't have an unpleasant surprise with a new deployment.