Nutanix Template for Zabbix

Cet article est également disponible en français

For the needs of our infrastructure, I built a Nutanix Template for the monitoring plateforme Zabbix. This template automatically discover containers, CVMs, hard drives, hypervisors and virtual machines.

Once the items are discovered, some metrics, graphs and triggers are deployed

To be able …

Cet article est également disponible en français

For the needs of our infrastructure, I built a Nutanix Template for the monitoring plateforme Zabbix. This template automatically discover containers, CVMs, hard drives, hypervisors and virtual machines.

Once the items are discovered, some metrics, graphs and triggers are deployed

To be able to use this template, the prism's SNMP server needs to be configured, the Nutanix MIB needs to be integrated in the zabbix server and some macros needs to be set at the host level in Zabbix. We will go through these few steps in the next part of this post.

The template is configured to use SNMPv3 in authPriv mode, using SHA auth and AES privacy.

Prism Central

The prism configuration is quite simple, using the SNMP configuration interface

2016-03-18 09_52_19-Nutanix Web Console

Make sure at least one Transport is configured in UDP, on the port of your choice (161 by default)

2016-03-18 09_52_56-Nutanix Web Console

Then, go in the 'Users' tab and add a new user for Zabbix.

2016-03-18 09_53_41-Nutanix Web Console

While you are here, you can download the MIB, we will need it later.

Clic Save. The prim configuration is done.

Nutanix MIB

One you have downloaded the Nutanix MIB, we need to upload it on the Zabbix server. On CentOS, it is located in /usr/share/snmp/mibs

# ls /usr/share/snmp/mibs/NUTANIX*
/usr/share/snmp/mibs/NUTANIX-MIB

Restart Zabbix so it can use this new MIB

# systemctl restart zabbix-server

You can test the MIB and the prism configuration using the snmpwalk command line tool. In the example, we are listing all the Nutanix containers.

snmpwalk -v 3 -a SHA -A YOURSHAPASSWORD -u zabbix -x AES -X YOURAESPASSWORD IP.OF.PRISM.CENTRAL -l AuthPriv citContainerName
NUTANIX-MIB::citContainerName.1 = STRING: container00.
NUTANIX-MIB::citContainerName.2 = STRING: containerA.
NUTANIX-MIB::citContainerName.3 = STRING: containerB.
NUTANIX-MIB::citContainerName.4 = STRING: containerC.
NUTANIX-MIB::citContainerName.5 = STRING: RESERVED_SPACE.
NUTANIX-MIB::citContainerName.6 = STRING: containerD.

The server configuration is done, we can now configure Zabbix itself.

Zabbix

If it's not already done, create a new host for prism central in Zabbix. The host needs 3 macros for the Nutanix Template to work on it.

Those 3 macros are

  • {$NTX_SNMP_USER} : the SNMP user
  • {$NTX_SNMP_AUTH} : the SHA password
  • {$NTX_SNMP_PRIV} : the AES password

Then, import this Template in Zabbix and apply it on your prism central host.

By default, the VM discovery is disabled because I couldn't find a good way to create hosts from the LLD process.

If you have a big Nutanix cluster and Zabbix shows a timeout error while parsing the SNMP OIDs, you can increase this timeout in the Zabbix configuration file

Timeout=10

Known bugs :

  • Until NOS 4.6, LLD can't discover all hypervisors. This behavior is the same when using snmpwalk. I guess this is a Nutanix problem. Everything works fine in NOS 4.6
  • The number of found VMs is limited to 250. I guess this is a limitation on the Nutanix side.