Monitor guest on ESX hosts

[jkinning]

I am trying to figure out a method to monitor some Linux VM guests to make sure they stay on specific hosts. We are using DRS rules to assist with licensing. We have subscriptions for unlimited guests on 3 physical hosts. I have seen where something went astray and I had a guest on a host that shouldn't have been. Curious is anyone is monitoring their infrastructure like this and if so how are they doing so. I am looking to try and leverage Nagios XI since that is our infrastructure monitoring tool. Not 100% certain if my thinking is accurate but thought about monitoring all the VMware ESX hosts but only X,Y,Z should have Linux operating systems on them. If any other hosts sees a Linux guest then it sends out a notifications. There is probably another method to do this but just trying to figure out if Nagios XI can do that and if anyone is monitoring something similar. Trying to use Nagios XI to make sure we stay compliant even if DRS rules get broken.

[avandemore]

This might be a better question on the General Support > Nagios XI forums as the community at large can view and comment on it.

Usually a hypervisor creates a guest using a template of some type eg Win, Win64, Linux, Linux64, etc. In a hypervisor designed to be used in a cluster, you should be able to query the master node or one of the subordinates and get a listing of VM's, VM type, and node it's running on. This info may be exposed via SNMP and/or other means. At any rate this a question for your hypervisor vendor, not Nagios. Keep in mind though whatever the hypervisor reports as OS type may not actually be the OS type.

Once you get that info you can check if there is an existing plugin at https://exchange.nagios.org/ or if not here some info on writing your own:

https://nagios-plugins.org/doc/guidelines.html
https://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_localchecks.html
http://www.yourownlinux.com/2014/06/how ... cript.html