Monitor ESXi hosts with Nagios

Question

Does anyone recommend any methods for monitoring ESXi 4.1 hosts with Nagios? I have looked into SNMP but it seems to be in a pretty sorry state. Net-SNMP does not seem to be included and there is a built it SNMP daemon that I set up. However from the standard MIBs there only seems to really be network interface counters and the VMWare MIBs seem quite useless.

Right now I am considering SNMP for the interface speed and trying the plugins listed at http://unimpressed.org/post/96949609/monitoring-esxi-performance-through-nagios .

Anyone have a better idea? I would like to monitor the hosts directly, not through something like vCenter.

Answer 1

ESXi only provides comprehensive monitoring via CIM (WBEM\WS-MAN) not SNMP. Whether that was a good decision by VMware or not is an argument for another day but SNMP based monitoring and management support is (as you said) effectively useless. There is a thread on VMware Communities with a basic sample Python Script to provide some glue between ESXi's WBEM\WS-MAN interface and Nagios - I've never tried this as the System's Management tools I use can handle direct management via WS-MAN but it seems like a viable approach provided you are prepared to do a bit of coding in Python.