Enabling CIM on ESXi
Jan 16, 2009 Blogs
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:
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.
January 16th, 2009 at 20:17
nice one Joep! I’ve been putting off looking into the esxi cim stack a bit more, now i don’t have to
Stu
February 18th, 2009 at 0:32
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?
February 18th, 2009 at 16:28
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!
February 18th, 2009 at 16:34
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]
July 10th, 2009 at 23:44
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?
July 14th, 2009 at 0:34
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.
December 7th, 2009 at 21:27
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!
January 15th, 2010 at 21:52
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