ESXi - do not monitor all servers

General
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Hi,

I have a customer who monitors a bunch of ESXi servers and on most of these servers have between 5 and 20 hosts, which trigger WARN messages, because they are not running.

This works as expected, but in the majority of cases, this should not display a WARN, because they are test machines and are shut down deliberately. Unfortunately there’s no regex which could catch them all, so I just selected all machines, which are down, and removed them from the services.

The customer asks now, if he could simply put a specific file on this machines (e.g. /opt/monitor_me), which will then automatically let them appear in CMK or disappear in case the file’s not there. Now as I think about it, I guess the other way around is better. :wink: However, I’m quite sure that this is not possible - at least not out-of-the-box.

So, I’m thinking of an easy alternative way to make this more transparent. For the customer CMK is completely new and I had to create manuals with screenshots for the most simple tasks you can think of.

One way could be a view of all ESXi hosts, which does not show the monitored hosts, but the ones which are currently deactivated. Is such a view doable? And if yes, would it be possible to add a link for each host, adding it to the monitored ones with a click (maybe even activate changes as well)?

Thanks for reading,
Roland.

2

I just had another idea:

I can’t get them with a host name regex, but maybe there is some kind of description attribute in VMWare I could add for each unwanted host and apply a regex there?

3

Hi,

if you are referring to the warning created by the rule “ESX Host and virtual machine state”, you could rename the vm name in the vcenter and add a prefix that you then match with the vm rule in checkmk, like # or _

4

Yesterday we saw a talk at the conference by @PhilippL who has a tool that transforms VMware tags into Checkmk labels.

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5

Hi,
as Robert mention you can use LabelPicker to provide Vmware Tags as Host Labels.
Have a look at Vmware vSphere :: LabelPicker.
Quickstart guide is also available there.

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6

Thanks!
This is the way

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