Agentless / Network Monitoring with Hyperic

So… I’ve installed Hyperic and am using it to monitor a bunch of stuff (Disk Space, RAM, CPU, Services) on boxes that I have installed the Hyperic Agent on but I really want to just do a simple ping against a bunch of network devices for network monitoring…. Looking at the UI it is not at all obvious how I would accomplish such a task. The answer is you have to run the job against an agent, and here’s how you do that:

1. Install a Hyperic Agent that is going to do the actual pings for you. In my case I just installed it on my Hyperic Server. NOTE: You must install the agent as root

2. Browse to that “Platform”, i.e. the sever you installed the agent on.

3. In the little “Tools Menu” dropdown select “New Platform Service”

4. In the next window give this monitor a name and select the Service Type of “InetAddress Ping”:

5. The next screen is going to display a little banner that says “The resource has not been configured”. Click on the “Configuration Properties” hyperlink.

6. On this last step provide the FQDN or IP of the device that you want your agent to ping.

There you go, you are now ready to monitor your network connectivity using Hyperic. One last piece of advice; you might want to change the test interval to a smaller number than the default. You can do that from Administration > Monitoring Defaults > InetAddress Ping (click on the Edit Metric Template on the right side).

Changing VMware ESXi 5.1 Syslog settings via PowerCLI

Here is a quick and easy method to change the syslog settings on multiple ESX hosts using PowerCLI. First connect to your VC in PowerCLI and then run the below to see your current remote syslog server on each of the ESXi Hosts:

get-vmhost | Get-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name Syslog.global.logHost

After getting that information you can then push out new changes:

#Get Each Host Connected to the vC
foreach ($myHost in get-VMHost)
{
    #Display the ESXi Host that you are applying the changes to
    Write-Host '$myHost = ' $myHost

    #Set the Syslog LogHost
    Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name Syslog.global.logHost -Value 'server.domain.com,server2.domain.com' -VMHost $myHost
  
    #Use Get-EsxCli to restart the syslog service
    $esxcli = Get-EsxCli -VMHost $myHost
    $esxcli.system.syslog.reload()

    #Open the firewall on the ESX Host to allow syslog traffic
    Get-VMHostFirewallException -Name "syslog" -VMHost $myHost | set-VMHostFirewallException -Enabled:$true
}

For more information on set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration take a look at https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/wintk40u1/html/Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration.html

Updating AD Lookup Account on VMware vCVA

 

I needed to update the service account password that my vCVA uses to authenticate with AD and I discovered something that was confusing for a while, my Configuration options under “Sign-On and Discovery” was missing… you can hit the little down arrow to expand the options and “Configuration” is just not there…

The answer makes sense but is not immediately apparent. You need to logout of the vCVA and login as root@localos or another local account and then the option will appear. From here you can change your configuration freely.