Esxi 5.5 Warning Status of Other Host Hardware Objects

Overview

LogicMonitor uses the VMware API to provide comprehensive monitoring of VMware vCenter or standalone ESXi hosts. In this back up article, we outline how to set up ESXi host and/or vCenter server monitoring.

Setup Requirements

Creating a Read-simply User for an ESXi Host or vCenter Server

As highlighted in the next two sections, the process of creating a user varies depending upon whether you intend to monitor standalone ESXi hosts or a vCenter server.

Creating a user for an ESXi Host
Creating a user for a vCenter server

Creating a User for an ESXi Host

The following set of steps walk you through the process of creating a read-only user for an ESXi host that has rights to use the VMware API.

Using the vSphere Client, log in to the ESXi host that you would like to add to LogicMonitor equally a host.
From the Users tab, create a userid for the LogicMonitor Collector by right-clicking anywhere in the users table and clicking Add together.
From the Permissions tab, add together a new permission by right-clicking and clicking Add Permission.
In the Users section, click Add, and so select the LogicMonitor userid for this permission. Click Add, then OK.
Select the LogicMonitor user you added. In the Assigned Role section, select the "Read-only" role from the driblet-down menu. Ensure that the Propagate to Child Objects option is checked and click OK.
Yous must repeat this procedure on each individual ESXi host y'all want to add to LogicMonitor for monitoring. The credentials for ESXi users that have been added at the vCenter level will not exist inherited down to clustered hosts. For more information on how this is configured, please see VMware's vSphere documentation.

Note: Your credentials for ESXi hosts will be in the format of username/password (e.one thousand. logicmonitor/pass123).

Creating a User for a vCenter Server

If vCenter is integrated with Active Directory (AD), yous will find a group in vCenter that has a corresponding group in Advertizement. Only create a user with read-only permissions for your vCenter surround in Advertising and add it to the corresponding Advertizement grouping. Your credentials for vCenter will exist in the format of [electronic mail protected] (e.chiliad. [email protected]) with its password.

If vCenter is non integrated with Advertisement, you will create a new read-simply using a process like to that for creating an ESXi host user (described in the previous set of steps). However, information technology's of import to note that a key divergence betwixt ESXi host and vCenter is that vCenter credentials are formatted as [email protected] (e.g. [e-mail protected]) with password.

Configuring VMware Credentials in LogicMonitor

Within LogicMonitor, you demand to define theproperties esx.user and esx.pass on the global, grouping or device level, matching the read merely user y'all created in vSphere.

For LogicMonitor to provide ESXi hardware monitoring, you lot need to add the individual ESXi hosts to LogicMonitor – hardware status is not available by monitoring only vCenter.

No further configuration is needed to activate hardware monitoring – if y'all practice not run into hardware monitoring inside LogicMonitor, check that hardware status is available from the Virtual Infrastructure client. If not, then either:

Your hardware is non supported past ESXi for hardware monitoring. You may be able to obtain a hardware specific packet either from VMware or your hardware vendor.
The CIM provider is disabled – see this VMware knowledge base article.

Considerations

vCenter Tag Integration

Some of the VMware DataSources are capable of pulling in vCenter tags as instance backdrop. This is optional and can exist enabled by setting a device property named esx.tags to truthful. Currently the tag integration simply works on DataSources applied to vCenter devices. DataSources that currently support this functionality are:

VMware_vCenter_VMstatus
VMware_vCenter_VMsnapshots
VMware_vCenter_VMperformance

The tags will evidence upwards equally case-level properties on your VM instances, with the following format: auto.tag_category = tag.

Duplicate Cluster Naming

vCenter allows multiple clusters to have the same name as long as each cluster is in a different VMware Datacenter within the vCenter. Withal, inside LogicMonitor, this translates to duplicate instance names which is not supported (i.e duplicate instances are not discovered).

To ensure unique instance names and therefore discovery of all relevant clusters, add together the custom property of esx.instanceformat to the host and assign it a value of "dedupe" (case insensitive). This holding prepends the cluster name with the VMware Datacenter name (i.east. <datacenter> / <cluster>) in order to avoid duplicate case names.

Annotation: If this property is attack a host that has already been running for a while, it will force history loss on that host (and only that host).

Collector Proxies

If yous are using a proxy for your Collector access, so you will need to exclude these hosts from beingness proxied by your Collector or the Collector will not be able to access the VMware API. This is done by adding a value to the proxy.exclude setting found in your Collector'southward agent.conf file that reflect these hosts, proxy.exclude=hostname1|hostname2|hostname3|…, where the diverse hostnames correspond the IPs/hostnames for the various ESXi or vCenter hosts that have been added into LogicMonitor and are being monitored by the Collector.

If the Collector is not able to access the VMware API and your ESXi/vCenter device has been added via its hostname, edit the device to use its IP instead and repeat these configuration edits if needed.

Modifying the API Port or URI

If your vCenter or ESXi hosts are configured to expose their API on nonstandard ports, you can set the holding esx.url with an appropriate URL (eastward.g. https://192.168.ane.100:8443/sdk).

Creating Custom Alerts in VMWare vCenter

If your hardware is monitored using the VMware_vCenter_Alerts DataSource and it is reporting 0 equally its status code, it is in an unknown state every bit mentioned in the description for the country datapoint. In this example, we recommend you refer to VMware'southward documentation for configuring a VMware alarm (or use some other supported monitoring method for hardware monitoring).

The land datapoint description contains the following output format as a reference:

0=Grey – status unknown or cannot be retrieved
ane=Green – normal operation
2=Xanthous – alarm threshold
three=Ruby-red – error threshold

If monitoring of this hardware is supported by VMware and an alarm is configured in VMware, the VMware_vCenter_Alerts DataSource has alerts set for condition codes 2 and three.

Note: The VMware_vCenter_Alerts DataSource monitors only alerts for ESX hosts in vCenter. Additional alerts not associated with an ESX host volition not exist discovered.

Troubleshooting Access

vCenter Tuning

Large queries to clusters may identify an excessive load on internal DB, resulting in data drove issues. To remedy such issues, please follow the recommendations in this article: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2107096
Yous must ensure your vCenter server is sized appropriately for the numbers of hosts and VMs it is managing. See VMware's documentation for size requirements. (Note that the vCenter database requirements must exist added to the vCenter server requirements if they are on the aforementioned motorcar.) If you are using vCenter v.5 or lower, information technology is also oftentimes necessary to tune the vCenter memory configuration, as documented in VMware'southward knowledgebase here and hither. (vCenter vi volition dynamically adjust the memory resource allotment to the services if the VM running vCenter is allocated more retentiveness and rebooted.) If vCenter does non have enough resources, information technology may refuse some connections to the API (HTTPS) port (easily seen in the HTTPS- DataSource in LogicMonitor), or it may report a value of "-i" to some functioning queries. Both of these situations will crusade gaps in graphs. This is not an issue with LogicMonitor.
If your vCenter 5-minute Statistics Collection Level is gear up to "Level 1" some datapoints for Resource Puddle may not return data. In order to access all of the necessary counters monitored, you lot will need to set your vCenter Statistics Drove Level to "Level 2." This can be done within your vSphere Web Client (y'all must use the 'flex'or 'flash' interface (not HTML5)) by performing the following steps:
- Select your vCenter example in tree.
- Open up the Configure tab.
- Click General, then Statistics, then Edit.
- From the dropdown in the "Statistics Level" cavalcade, select "Level 2" for the first item listed in the tabular array.

VMware LogicModules

DataSources are carve up into two categories, those that employ direct to the ESXi hosts and those that utilize to vCenter.

VMware_ESXi_*
VMware_vCenter_*

Over fourth dimension, LogicMonitor has released iii separate suites for VMware monitoring, each suite intended to (largely) deprecate the LogicModules in the previous suite. In general, we attempt to provide updates (rather than replacements) for existing modules when making improvements, but this isn't always feasible.

In the post-obit table, we've provided a list of DataSources included in each generation. Each row of the tabular array represents equivalent DataSources across the generations.

Note: Because module names are inverse each fourth dimension nosotros deprecate an existing suite in favor of a new suite, there will be no event importing the new set of modules if you are currently using the previous set. Withal, because this does hateful that your hosts volition be queried by the Collector more frequently, we recommend that the existing modules eventually be disabled manually or deleted.

Generation 1	Generation 2	Generation 3
ESX CPU Cores	VMware_vSphere_CPUdetail	VMware_ESXi_HostCPUCores
North/A	VMware_vSphere_CPUsummary	VMware_ESXi_HostCPUCores
ESXDatastore-	VMware_vSphere_DatastoreCapacity	VMware_ESXi_DatastoreCapacity VMware_vCenter_DatastoreCapacity
N/A	Northward/A	VMware_vCenter_DatastoreClusters
N/A	North/A	VMware_ESXi_DatastoreStatus VMware_vCenter_DatastoreStatus
ESXDatastore_Perf-	VMware_vSphere_DatastorePerformance	VMware_ESXi_DatastorePerformance VMware_vCenter_DatastorePerformance
ESX Resource Pools-	VMware_vSphere_ResourcePools	VMware_ESXi_ResourcePools VMware_vCenter_ResourcePools
ESX_VM_Status	VMware_vSphere_VMstatus	VMware_vCenter_VMstatus VMware_vSphere_VMstatus (applies to ESXi hosts)
ESX_Temperature_Sensors	VMware_vSphere_TemperatureSensors	Due north/A
ESX VM-	VMware_vSphere_VMperformance	VMware_vCenter_VMperformance VMware_vSphere_VMperformance (applies to ESXi hosts)
ESX_CPU_Core_Averages	VMware_vSphere_CPUcoreAverage	VMware_ESXi_Resources
ESX Hardware Health-	VMware_vSphere_HardwareSensors	VMware_ESXi_HardwareSensors
N/A	North/A	VMware_ESXi_HardwareSensorFans
North/A	N/A	VMware_ESXi_HardwareSensorPower
ESX Host Interfaces-	VMware_vSphere_HostInterfaces	VMware_ESXi_HostInterfaces VMware_vCenter_HostInterfaces
ESX Guest Logical Volume	VMware_vSphere_vDiskCapacity	VMware_vCenter_VMDiskCapacity VMware_vSphere_vDiskCapacity (applies to ESXi hosts)
ESXHost-	VMware_vSphere_HostPerformance	VMware_ESXi_HostPerformance VMware_vCenter_HostPerformance
N/A	Northward/A	VMware_ESXi_HostStatus VMware_vCenter_HostStatus
ESX VM Snapshots-	VMware_vSphere_VMsnapshots	VMware_vCenter_VMsnapshots VMware_vSphere_VMsnapshots (applies to ESXi hosts)
VMware_Troubleshooter	VMware_LM_Troubleshooter	VMware_LM_Troubleshooter
ESX Cluster-	VMware_vSphere_ClusterPerformance	VMware_vCenter_ClusterPerformance
N/A	VMware_vSphere_AdmissionControl	VMware_vCenter_AdmissionControl
N/A	N/A	VMware_vCenter_HostVSwitch
N/A	VMware_vSphere_ObjectCount	VMware_ESXi_ObjectCount VMware_vCenter_ObjectCount
N/A	VMware_vSphere_NetworkStatus	VMware_ESXi_NetworkStatus VMware_vCenter_NetworkStatus
N/A (ConfigSource)	VMware_vSphere_VMconfiguration (ConfigSource)	VMware_vSphere_VMconfiguration (ConfigSource)
North/A	N/A	VMware_vCenter_Alerts
N/A	N/A	VMware_vCenter_HANodeHealth
N/A	North/A	VMware_vCenter_HAStatus
North/A	N/A	VMware_vCenter_VMDK
Northward/A	N/A	VMware_vCenter_VMInterface
N/A	North/A	addCategory_StandaloneESXi

Removing VMware Monitoring

Once discovered, VMware monitoring will not exist automatically removed from a device, in guild to prevent the loss of data due to a temporary failure. If y'all have removed vCenter from a windows server, or otherwise wish to remove VMware monitoring from a device in LogicMonitor, at that place are two options:

Delete the device, and re-add information technology. Only the currently running services will be discovered, simply y'all will lose all history about the device.
Apply a debug command on the Collector to remove the specific holding that associates the VMware DataSources. This will leave non-VMware information unaffected. For example, for a device named "2012c" you could remove the property by running the following control on the responsible Collector: !hostproperty activity=del host=2012c holding=virtualization.