Zabbix Agent installed on VCSA 6.0?

[vcsa]

I've posted this question on VMware communities as well but I figured I'd ask Zabbix folks directly as well:

How do I get Zabbix Agent working on VCSA 6.0? (VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.0)

It's SLES (Linux) with an apparently proprietary firewall system.

I'm trying to get the Zabbix Agent installed on the server in order to monitor the baseline foodgroups of the server (CPU, RAM, disk) as well as some basic services (postgre and VPXD).

Is the Zabbix Agent the best way to do this? Or is there a better way?

[vcsa]

I just wanted to say that a colleague discovered that you can add a firewall exception directly on VCSA 6.0 using the iptables command.

[reinard]

What worked for me

This is what i did to install the agent:

zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/server:monitoring/SLE_11_SP3/server:monitoring.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install zabbix-agent

This didn't properly setup the log and pid dirs for me, so

mkdir /var/run/zabbix
chown zabbix:zabbix /var/run/zabbix/ /var/log/zabbix/

Then edit /etc/zabbix/zabbix-agentd.conf as needed. It also doesn't properly setup zabbix-agent as a service, so I manually start it:

/etc/init.d/zabbix-agentd start

and add the above line to /etc/init.d/after.local as well

Regarding the firewall this rule opens the port (I could not figure out a way to adjust the port filter via the web interface):

iptables -A port_filter -p tcp -m tcp --dport 10050 -j ACCEPT

you'll have to devise some way of saving/restoring this on boot

for me i did

iptables-save > /etc/iptables.rules

and then add

iptables-restore -c < /etc/iptables.rules

into /etc/init.d/after.local

[Sean35]

reinard - Thanks for taking the time to post this, hugely helpful.

[ErikS]

Worked for me too. Thanks reinard!

[bbrendon]

A slightly different way to the above which was very solid. Thanks!

# Add this to /etc/init.d/after.local (x.x.x.x is the zabbix server)

/usr/sbin/iptables -I INPUT -s x.x.x.x -j ACCEPT

# Setup the service to start on boot.
insserv zabbix-agentd

I tried to figure out a more graceful way to modify the firewall rules and couldn't. Not a big fan of messing with restore/save myself.

[troffasky]

Would make more sense to use active agent items if allowing connections in to the VCSA is a hassle.