monitoring

OpenBSD as a monitoring server using Xymon

    

I’ve been using various monitoring software for a long time now. I always use two kinds of monitoring tools: service checkers, like Nagios, Monit… and metrics graphers, like RRDtool, Cacti, Munin, … I like the Xymon software, AKA Hobbit Monitor, because it can achieve both, uses very low resources and can be customized quite easily. I used to run it on a FreeBSD virtual machine with ZFS activated. The idea was to compress and deduplicate the RRD data. But in fact, the RRD files weight less than 100MB and ZFS is of no use here. Plus, it seems my 3 virtual disks configuration makes the system lagging a lot ; or is it just the FreeBSD implementation. Anyway, that machine keeps sending timeouts and I can get why. Plus, comparing performance of both VMs, FreeBSD and VMware tools doesn’t seem to use less of my ESXi resources. So it’s time to replace it by some OS that never fails me: OpenBSD.

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Monitor VMware vSphere from OpenBSD using the Perl SDK

    

Last time, I had a look at how to monitor VMware vSphere from FreeBSD using the Perl SDK . Quite simple using the ports! Believe it or not, installing and running the VMware vSphere Perl SDK on OpenBSD is as simple as breathing. Here’s the POC.

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Statistics from Freebox Revolution into Xymon server

    

For those who may not know, the “Freebox Revolution” is the 6th release of the access box from the French ADSL/FTTH provider named “Free”. In my case, it provides Internet access via FTTH. The box has a Web management interface from where you can configure and check statistics. The only “sad” news is that it does not provide any SNMP service. The only way to keep a eye on what goes through the ports is to log on the Web interface. Here’s how I use the Web interface to grab metrics and show them in Xymon.

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Show last 24 hours in Xymon trends

    

By default, Xymon’s trends show metrics for the last 48 hours. Should you want to “only” get the last 24 hours on the main “trends” page, you have to edit the xymon/server/etc/xymonserver.cfg and edit or add the TRENDSECONDS variable. 86400 will render only the last 24 hours. Note that TRENDSECONDS is optimized for the default RRDWIDTH and INTERVAL values. Setting random or too small TRENDSECONDS may lead to ugly graphics rendering.

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Monitor VMware vSphere from FreeBSD using the Perl SDK

    

VMware provides a CLI and a Perl SDK that allows managing and monitoring vSphere and ESXi environment from Windows and Linux. The Perl SDK is also available in the FreeBSD ports tree. Here’s how to install and, basically, use the VMware Perl SDK on FreeBSD.

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