vCenter Server Appliance monitoring with Netdata

The vCenter Server Appliance using Health API is a preconfigured Linux virtual machine, which is optimized for running VMware vCenter Server® and the associated services on Linux.

This module collects health statistics from one or more vCenter Server Appliance servers, depending on your configuration.

Requirements

• vSphere 6.5+

Charts

• Overall System Health in status
• Components Health in status
• Software Updates Health in status

Health statuses

Overall System Health:

Numeric	Text	Description
-1	unknown	Module failed to decode status.
0	green	All components in the appliance are healthy.
1	yellow	One or more components in the appliance might become overloaded soon.
2	orange	One or more components in the appliance might be degraded.
3	red	One or more components in the appliance might be in an unusable status and the appliance might become unresponsive soon.
4	gray	No health data is available.

Components Health:

Numeric	Text	Description
-1	unknown	Module failed to decode status.
0	green	The component is healthy.
1	yellow	The component is healthy, but may have some problems.
2	orange	The component is degraded, and may have serious problems.
3	red	The component is unavailable, or will stop functioning soon.
4	gray	No health data is available.

Software Updates Health:

Numeric	Text	Description
-1	unknown	Module failed to decode status.
0	green	No updates available.
2	orange	Non-security patches might be available.
3	red	Security patches might be available.
4	gray	An error retrieving information on software updates.

Configuration

Edit the go.d/vcsa.conf configuration file using edit-config from the Netdata config directory, which is typically at /etc/netdata.

cd /etc/netdata # Replace this path with your Netdata config directory
sudo ./edit-config go.d/vcsa.conf

Needs only url, username and password. Here is an example for 2 servers:

jobs:
  - name: vcsa1
    url: https://203.0.113.0
    username: admin@vsphere.local
    password: somepassword

  - name: vcsa2
    url: https://203.0.113.10
    username: admin@vsphere.local
    password: somepassword

For all available options please see module configuration file.

Troubleshooting

To troubleshoot issues with the vcsa 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.

cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/
sudo -u netdata -s

You can now run the go.d.plugin to debug the collector:

./go.d.plugin -d -m vcsa