Monitor and CIM alerts

[elwappo]

Does the monitor provide any way to pass an alert on from an ESX3i box that is having a hardware issue? I'm guessing that info would be dumped to the event log on the ESX3i host. Or is there another way to monitor for issues with the hardware using the CIM support inside the monitor? Thanks!

[Gostev]

Hello elwappo, Veeam Monitor does not currently have this feature.
However, this feature is a part of upcoming version 4.0 of our enterprise VMware monitoring offering (Veeam/nworks Management Pack for VMware), which is soon to hit the beta.

[elwappo]

So will this be added to the current Veeam monitor? Or is the enterprise version something new?

[Gostev]

It is a separate product, and it is not new
http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitor ... tions.html

We will consider adding this functionality to Veeam Monitor as well, if we get many requests and depending on feedback from MP 4.0

[elwappo]

Thanks for the information. I would like to request this added to the monitor as it is already an alerting platform for conditions relating to resource utilization and it would seem to be a good place to add CIM alerting as well. I'm thinking that if a hardware issue happens on 3i anyway that it adds an event to the event log. I'm going to test this and if that's the case it may already support this type of functionality by sending emails on events.

Does the event monitor in Veeam monitor pull from the host if it is not connected to a Vcenter server?

Thanks again for your help.

[Gostev]

Veeam Monitor can monitor stand-alone ESXi hosts without any issues. However, I believe that alerts can only be built on VirtualCenter events. I will check this for you tomorrow.

[elwappo]

Thanks! I did notice that the ESX3i host I am monitoring does report in the events tab when events occur like user logins and logouts. That's why I'm thinking that if CIM pumps an event out there and the VEEAM monitor can see it we could build an alert around that. But we would have to figure out what the error condition looked like. The test server I have does not show the hard disks via the 3i infrastructure client like my productions servers do so I was unable to test this. Again thanks for any help!

[Gostev]

Hello, I have asked developers to test this, and they were able to create Veeam Monitor alerts based on events from stand-alone ESX host, so this looks good. So if CIM can pump events into ESX event log, then you should be able to achieve what you are trying to. You just need to figure our event substring that you want to match important hardware events on. Please, keep us posted on your progress.

[elwappo]

I'm happy to keep you posted. I just need to find a resource on VMware's site that lists what these errors would look like in the event log. Do your developers have support in VMware to have access to that kind of information as a partner? I'm not sure where to start looking. Thanks again!

[Gostev]

I will ask our nworks MP developer to answer this since he has been working on this stuff lately.
BTW Veeam Monitor does not fetch all the events by default, so you would need to perform a registry edit in order for it to start to pickup these additional events.

[elwappo]

Where would the registry edit need to be on the machine running the VEEAM monitor?

Thanks!

[Gostev]

Please let us know what events you would like to add to data collection, and I will have developers provide the exact string and location to include those events

[Gostev]

Here's an update from our nworks MP developer

I think your customer is running into a VMware limitation, in that VMware introduced these new hardware sensors after the 2.5 API but before the 4.0 API releases next year. The 2.5 API had no events defined for sensors (I don't believe). The complete list of events (that is, their message catalog) is only accessible via the API, but I've formatted it into an XML file for viewing. http://nworks.com/vmware/overview/data/vc2Events.xml

I looked at a similar listing available on our VMware V4 Beta systems and found that there are 90 new events defined. One of them looks relevant: HealthStatusChangedEvent. The text for this message reads: "Health status of component {componentName} changed from {oldStatus} to {newStatus}"

I also looked to see if there was a way to create a VC alert, but I see no trigger related to hardware sensors.

So, I think the answer is that monitor will not be able to report any hardware sensor event until the V4 release of VMware in early 2009.

[elwappo]

Thanks for the information and the research you have done!