The vCenter Server Appliance using Health API is a preconfigured Linux virtual machine, which is optimized for running VMware vCenter Server® and the associated services on Linux.
The prerequisites for monitoring vCenter Server Appliance with Netdata are to have vCenter Server Appliance and Netdata installed on your system.
Netdata auto discovers hundreds of services, and for those it doesn’t turning on manual discovery is a one line configuration. For more information on configuring Netdata for vCenter Server Appliance monitoring please read the collector documentation.
You should now see the vCenter Server Appliance section on the Overview tab in Netdata Cloud already populated with charts about all the metrics you care about.
Netdata has a public demo space (no login required) where you can explore different monitoring use-cases and get a feel for Netdata.
System Health is a metric that is used to evaluate the overall health of a vCenter Server Appliance. It is important to monitor this metric to ensure that the appliance is functioning properly and that any issues are identified and addressed quickly.
Netdata has a built-in alert for this metric and raises a critical alert if the system health status is RED (3) or a warning if it is YELLOW (1) or ORANGE (2). The expected value is GREEN (0).
The Components health metric is a set of individual metrics that measure the health of each component of the vCenter Server Appliance. Applmgmt measures the health of the appliance management services, while database_storage measures the health of the vCenter Server Appliance’s database. Mem and storage measure the memory and storage usage respectively, and swap measures the amount of swap space available. It is important to monitor these metrics to ensure that the appliance has sufficient resources and that any issues are identified and addressed quickly.
Netdata has built-in alerts for this chart, and raises separate alerts for swap health, storage health, mem health, database storage health, load health, applmgmt health.
Software Update Health is a metric that measures the health of the vCenter Server Appliance’s software updates. It is important to monitor this metric to ensure that the appliance is running the most up-to-date software and that any potential security vulnerabilities are addressed quickly.