Enabling CIM on ESXi

My ESXi-machine has been running for a long time, but I never took the effort to get some form of hardware-monitoring working. After the network at the datacenter went dark for a while, I thought that my machine had physically crashed. Luckily, the machine was still up-and-running, but it did scare me. Therefore, I decided to tinker around with some form of monitoring, and settled on Nagios (which I already had set up), and an addon script called ‘check_esx_wbem.py‘.

Firstly, I needed to enable CIM on my ESXi box. After searching around the advanced settings for a while, I found the following three options, and changed the first two from a ‘0′ to a ‘1′:

  • Misc.CimEnabled=1
  • Misc.CimOemProvidersEnabled=1
  • Misc.CimWatchdogInterval=60

After that, I logged into the Tech Support Mode, I started the CIM-daemon:

/etc/init.d/sfcbd
/etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog

Lastly, I went into the VI Client and executed a ‘Reset Sensors’ on the ‘Health Status’ page of the configuration. Afterwards, the ‘Health Status’ showed me the hardware-status of the machine:

esxi-cim

With the ESXi configuration done, all I had to do was to configure Nagios, which was simple enough. I used an article on NagiosExchange. Thanks to Michiel Dijcks for helping me out with the Nagios part.

For an example how this would look in Nagios, please go here.

8 Responses to “Enabling CIM on ESXi”

  1. Stu Says:

    nice one Joep! I’ve been putting off looking into the esxi cim stack a bit more, now i don’t have to :)

    Stu


  2. Ritmo2k Says:

    Joep,
    Can you post your plugin conf for Nagios. I have the python script working fine, but cant get Nagios to execute it w/o returning null as the output?


  3. j.piscaer Says:

    Ritmo: on the ESXi-side, I haven’t done anything special. On the nagios side, I just loaded the python script:

    $USER1$/check_esx_wbem.py https:\/\/10.10.100.2:5989 root $USER2$ $ARG1$

    $USER2$ is the password. Please mind the escaping of the slashes!


  4. Michiel Dijcks Says:

    Be sure to backslash-escape the slashes in your esx(i) server’s address, for instance:

    $USER1$/check_esx_wbem.py https:\/\/your.esx.server.com:5989 [verbose]


  5. air2 Says:

    My nagios status information for this check shows only the first line “20090116 13:09:20 Connection to https://10.10.100.2:5989” and not the 30+ lines showed in “http://img.virtuallifestyle.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/extinfocgi.htm”.

    I’m on nagios 2.8, python 2.6.2, pywbem 0.7.

    any ideas?


  6. air2 Says:

    seems to be a nagios version limitation.

    I ran “$USER1$/check_esx_wbem.py https:\/\/your.esx.server.com:5989 [verbose]” on nagios 3.1.2 and the output contained every CIM check.


  7. robb Says:

    How do you get Nagios to report on criticals and warnings with this script?

    I got the plugin working — when I run it from the command line as the nagios user, it outputs problems with the server (I yanked the redundant power).

    However, Nagios still shows a green OK and has checked several times…

    Thanks!


  8. Erick Rangel Says:

    has anyone configured CIM to talk to HP Insight? I installed the HP integrated ESXi 3.5 u4 version. I am unsure after searching where to actually set the community string on the ESXi host. I don’t see anything such as a snmpd.conf?

    Thanks!
    -Erick


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