VMware discovery vs. direct agent?

[pgsengstock]

Hi all,

To start, I've been trying to get a full blown Zabbix environment off the ground for about three years, since I first heard about it. I had one partially running, but it fell victim to an unexpected hard drive failure (is there any other kind?).

In 2.2, I REALLY like the concept of being able to just plug in the info for my VMware ESXi boxes and get stats for all the VMs running on them. Unfortunately, I'm not quite getting all the info I'd like (graphs, etc.), and I feel like I'd be further along by just deploying the agent to each VM. This would also let me group all the VMs in a more meaningful way. I'm also one of those weird folks who's running ESXi on Apple hardware so I can virtualize OS X.

Does anyone else have any anecdotal reasoning for using VMware discovery instead of Zabbix agents on each VM?

Thanks!


Pete

[steveboyson]

It depends on what your focus is. If it is the "guest view" you have more complete results with installing agents on the guests plus you can add custom scripts.
If it is the "esx host view" you will find that the checks delivered with 2.2 are not quite sufficient. We use external scripts for that which we run on the vMA.
Also, monitoring the VDP (backup appliance) needs additional scripting (parsing logfiles or inspecting it's postgres DB).

So my opinion is: agents on the guests, scripts for the server. We don't use the vSphere features of 2.2 since they are too basic for our needs.

[tchjts1]

I concur with what Steve mentions above. I have only implemented VM discovery in a test case using one lab ESX server, and drew similar conclusions as Steve.

I think it is a good start in the right direction though, and hopefully development will mature surrounding this. At this point though, using the agent is more beneficial to me than the discovery portion. And trying to use both of them on the same target can be rather frustrating, from what I have read.

[gavind]

So my opinion is: agents on the guests, scripts for the server.

Right on the point! Thanks for that Steve.