SNMP monitors with vSphere

[Berg0]

hi all,

I use Solarwinds IP monitor to do basic up/down monitoring my my mid sized IT infrastructure. I'm looking to monitor the datastores (netapp cluster) on my ESX hosts (5 sunfire servers) because the Netap LUNs are a block level device I can't monitor storage utilization on the filer, so I want to use SNMP on the esx hosts. IPmonitor doesn't do well being sent SNMP traps, as it'll only alert once, so I want to set up IPmonitor to poll the server every minute or so.

I've previously configured SNMP on ESX 3.5 U4 using net-snmp and had a cacti server graphing the output but this feature is no longer supported in vSphere. to get around this I enabled net-snmp by editing my snmpd.conf file setting up my correct community string etc, and created a proxy to access the VMWARE SNMP MIBs within the conf file by adding "proxy -v 1 -c public udp:127.0.0.1:171 .1.3.6.1.4.1.6876"
from my understanding this should work, but if I do an snmpwalk on the host it doesn't work.

wondering if anyone has set up something similar?

peripheral to this, I'm wondering if I can just poll the vcenter server via snmp and get all the info I need?
I suppose I could just parse info from a 'df -h" on the host but I'd rather not be running a shell script to grab my info on the ESX hosts

any input is appreciated

 

[lopoetve]

wellp, you just hit the one ESX thing I don't know.

g'luck! Wish I could help

Try disabling the firewall - don't remember if we block that by default at all
(esxcfg-firewall --allowincoming --allowoutgoing)
(to re-enable, do blockincoming/blockoutgoing)

edit: and df won't do it. And you do not, under ANY circumstances, want to be scripting regular vdf (the appropriate command) loops Trust me on this. That is, if you want your storage to stay up

 

[Berg0]

might have got it working

problem was my snmpwalk command did not have the snmp version specified I needed to add "-v 2c" to my snmpwalk and it started working!

 

[lopoetve]

lol. Go ahead, networking support is good VDF requires a metadata lock and reservation. This is bad to have happening all the time

 

[Berg0]

ok, I'm an idiot

you can't poll SNMP for datastore LUN size.. shit.

What's the easiest way to monitor a vmware datastore LUN size? (hopefully there is a way to do it with SNMP?) Solarwinds doesn't have support for the VMware API in IPmonitor that I'm aware of. Can I poll vcenter directly through SNMP for this purpose?

 

[Berg0]

lol. Go ahead, networking support is good VDF requires a metadata lock and reservation. This is bad to have happening all the time

So, doing vmfs datastore monitoring via SNMP isn't looking good. Any other recommendations? I am tempted to jsut write a script to parse the output of a vdf -h, how bad is bad? haha. if I were to run it as a cron job, hourly, would that be "OK" ? other option would be to make SOAP requests or whatever to the VMware API with an executable and have my monitoring software trigger the executable to run and use the returned value for monitoring growth.

it's unfortunate that I can't monitor this simply with SNMP, I wanted to track datastore capacity utilization in CACTI.

 

[lopoetve]

If they hit at the same time, reservation conflict that may last long enough to down storage, causing an outage.

If you must, do it from one host only.

 

[Berg0]

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I'll look into using the API for making calls to vcenter for the info if I can, will just need to make the monitor run the executable, and I'll just monitor the volumes less aggressively.