Fellow vExpert Jakub Felinski over at the weblog “Virtualization in Practice” has posted a really nice article about using Nagios to monitor a VMware vSphere environment. Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better. Jacub has added all the necessary VMware modules to the Nagios virtual appliance which can be downloaded in OVF format at his website. He also created a description with the configuration changes at ESX level, it’s real easy to get it up and running. The original Polish article with download link can be found here and the Google translation can be found here.
By default, each ESX host gets a set of basic tests which include:
• CPU usage
• Disk latency (read write)
• Hardware sensors
• Disk operations canceled
• State of network cards
• Memory swapping
• Free space in each Datastore
