vCenter Server monitoring with Netdata
VMware vCenter Server is advanced server management software
that provides a centralized platform for controlling your VMware vSphere environments.
This module collects hosts and vms performance statistics from one or more vCenter servers depending on configuration.
Charts#
It produces the following charts:
Virtual Machine#
- Cpu Usage Total in
% - Memory Usage Percentage in
% - Memory Usage in
KiB - VMKernel Memory Swap Rate in
KiB/s - VMKernel Memory Swap in
KiB - Network Bandwidth Total in
KiB/s - Network Packets Total in
packets - Network Drops Total in
packets - Disk Usage Total in
KiB/s - Disk Max Latency in
ms - Overall Alarm Status in
status - System Uptime in
seconds
Host#
- Cpu Usage Total in
% - Memory Usage Percentage in
% - Memory Usage in
KiB - VMKernel Memory Swap Rate in
KiB/s - VMKernel Memory Swap in
KiB - Network Bandwidth Total in
KiB/s - Network Packets Total in
packets - Network Drops Total in
packets - Network Errors Total in
errors - Disk Usage Total in
KiB/s - Disk Max Latency in
ms - Overall Alarm Status in
status - System Uptime in
seconds
Configuration#
Edit the go.d/vsphere.conf configuration file using edit-config from the
Netdata config directory, which is typically at /etc/netdata.
Needs only url, username and password. Here is an example for 2 servers:
For all available options please see module configuration file.
Hosts/vms filtering#
Module supports filtering hosts and vms. Filtering options are host_include and vm_include.
host_includeis a list of match patterns:/Dc pattern[/Cluster pattern/Host pattern].vm_includeis a list of match patterns:/Dc pattern[/Cluster pattern/Host pattern/VM name].
Pattern should start with /. It matches name,
syntax: simple patterns.
Examples:
Update every#
Default update_every is 20 seconds and it doesnt make sense to decrease the value. VMware real-time statistics are
generated at the 20-seconds specificity.
It is likely that 20 seconds is not enough for big installations and the value should be tuned.
To get better view we recommend to run the collector in debug mode and see how much time it will take to collect metrics.
Example (all not related debug lines were removed):
There you can see that discovering took 525.614041ms, collecting metrics took 154.77997ms. Discovering is a separate
thread, it doesnt affect collecting.
update_every and timeout parameters should be adjusted based on these numbers.
Troubleshooting#
To troubleshoot issues with the vsphere collector, run the go.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output
should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.
First, navigate to your plugins directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your
system, open netdata.conf and look for the setting plugins directory. Once you're in the plugin's directory, switch
to the netdata user.
You can now run the go.d.plugin to debug the collector: