VMware vCenter monitoring

[CheckMan]

CMK version: 2.2.0p32
OS version: Ubuntu 22.04

Hello,

I would like to monitor my vCenter server VM itself for things like CPU, Memory and Disk Usage.
I got it running with the special VMware Plugin/Rule but there are no services for CPU and memory like in other monitored hosts.

Is there anything I forgot?

Regards
CheckMan

[DanielNunesFerreira (Daniel Ferreira)]

Hey there,

It may sound obvious (sorry about that) but have you tried using the normal Windows agent on the server itself?

[CheckMan]

In my case the vCenter Server is the Linux appliance.

[aeckstein (Andre Eckstein)]

Hi Checkman,

the API of the vCenter special agent does not provide informations about the “inside” of the vCenter Appliance.
If the name of the vCenter appliance in the vCenter inventory matches a hostname in checkmk, you can get additional informations like ESX CPU/Memory with the piggyback mechanism.

I was once able to copy the bash script part of the checkmk Agent into the appliance and trigger it remotely via ssh.
For that you will have to change the vCenter appliance shell to bash (there is a KB article how to do that)
This is not officially supported by Broadcom and i have not tested that in vCenter 8, but you can give it a try.

[ttr (Tom Tretbar)]

You can use SNMP, works like a charm. in appliancesh:

vicfg-snmp -c <community>
vicfg-snmp -C <contact>
vicfg-snmp -L <location>
vicfg-snmp -E <host>
vicfg-snmp -e

to configure a trap destination and send a test trap:

vicfg-snmp -t <target>/<trap community>
vicfg-snmp -T

ttr