Updating, Replacing or Downgrading Hyperic System Plugins

Sometimes you have an updated Hyperic plugin that you need to replace with a different version on an agent and it will not push for various reasons. To get around this just copy the new plugin file directly to /opt/hyperic/hyperic-hqee-agent/bundles/agent-5.7.0/pdk/plugins on the agent machine and restart the agent service (service hyperic-hqee-agent restart). At this point you are good to go.

Pushing New Plugin to Hyperic Agents

If you ever update a plugin on your Hyperic Server you may need to push it out to your Hyperic Agents. To do this find you Hyperic Agent under the Servers group. It should look like <Server Name> HQ Agent 5.0.0. Select this and go to the Views tab. From here select Agent Commands and Push Plugin. After pushing your plugin you will need to restart the agent using the same Agent Commands section.

vFabric Hyperic Server Heartbeat

I wrote a quick safety feature for my Hyperic server that monitors the Hyperic Server process every minute and if the Server stops or dies the script will attempt to restart it. Nothing fancy but it’s a nice little feature… plus you can change a couple lines and make one to monitor your Hyperic Agents as well…

#!/usr/bin/perl
# ---------- Hyperic 5.0.0 Server Heartbeat Check ------------
# This script is used to verify that the Hyperic 5.0.0 Server is running and
#    restarts it upon failure. To schedule it to run automatically every
#    minute on linux run the following:
#         crontab -e */1 * * * * <Path to this script>

# NOT SUPPORTED OR PROVIDED BY VMWARE AND HAS NO GUARENTEES

$cmd = "/opt/hyperic/server-5.0.0-EE/bin/hq-server.sh status";
$out = `$cmd`;
# print "Output $cmd\n";
# print "Output Check 1 - $out\n";
if (index($out, "HQ Server is not running") != -1)
        {
                # print "\nHQ Server is dead\n";
# Restart the HQ Service
                $cmd = "/opt/hyperic/server-5.0.0-EE/bin/hq-server.sh start" ;
                $out = `$cmd`;
                # print "Restarting the Service\n $out \n ";
        }
        else
        {
                # print "\nServer is running\n";
        }

Getting Started with vFabric Hyperic Monitoring and Alerting

During the past couple days I have been working with Hyperic to setup basic alerting functionality for things like disk space thresholds, Windows Services and memory usage by process. Here is a quick getting started to setup basic disk monitoring as well as an intro to the Hyperic Escalation Schemes which allow tiered alerting.

First off let’s create an Escalation Scheme. To do this go to Administration > Escalation Schemes Configuration.

Next Let’s go ahead and build the process of who gets alerted and when.

Now that we have setup the notification process let’s actually setup some alerts…For this example I will be setting up test disk space alerts on a subset of my servers. To get here you need to understand a few things:

1. Under the Resources Tab is where you are going to find all your things that can be monitored. Here comes the confusing part:

a. Platforms is the Server that your Hyperic Agent is running on.

b. Servers are things like .net, Apache Tomcat and MSSQL Server.

c. Services are things that you monitor like HTTP, Disks, CPU, RAM and Windows Services.

d. Compatible Groups/Clusters are groups of the same thing (ie, Disks only)/

e. Mixed Groups are groups that contain a mix of things like Disks and RAM.

Once you grasp this it will make your experience with Hyperic much easier.

Ok, so I have navigated to the Services Tab and filtered by “FileServer Mount” aka Disk information. Now I want to select my subset of disks and click on the Group button.

Next I click on "Add to a New Group”  to create a new group. Because this group contains all like items it will create a new Compatible Group.

Now you should see your new group.

From there click on the Alerts tab and click on Configure

Now I want to create a new alert against this group of servers. My normal if statement is “IF more THAN 0 of the Resources” because I want alerts if any of them go down.

Here’s an important note: if you select Total Bytes Avail or several other metrics your alert will NOT work by default, here’s why:

Go to Administration > Monitoring Defaults and find FileServer Mount and click Edit Metric Template.

This should bring up a screen like the below. Notice that the Default On is set to No for the Total Bytes Avail… if you build your alert on that setting and don’t check to make sure that valid data is coming in you might be lulled into a false sense of security… Word to the wise, make sure your monitors are green after you create them.

Congrats, you are now ready to use vFabric Hyperic to start basic monitoring in your environment.

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).