SNMP Monitoring

John Allison

Member
Feb 1, 2018
32
3
13
Gateshead UK
www.adlinktech.com
I'm currently evaluating proxmox and so far am really impressed. One thing that seems strangely missing tho is performance monitoring.

I've installed snmp on our 3 test nodes and can collect node related data, but it would be fantastic if i could collect data relating to the virtual machines running on the node.

I found a livirt-snmp project on 'wiki.libvirt.org/page/Libvirt-snmp' but cant get it to work.

Any ideas or suggestions on how i can monitor virtual machines running on Proxmox via SNMP?

Also, anyone think it would be a cool idea to have extensive vm monitoring built in?
 
I found a livirt-snmp project on 'wiki.libvirt.org/page/Libvirt-snmp' but cant get it to work.
We are not using libvirt.

Any ideas or suggestions on how i can monitor virtual machines running on Proxmox via SNMP?
Why SNMP, modern monitoring systems usually have their own agent or checks to get data. You could use the rrd data already gathered and send it to influxdb or graphite. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/External_Metric_Server
 
.... or you can install snmp on any VM you want, and then you can get what you want.
HINT: librenms is a great tool, and they have VM image, ready to use!
 
We are not using libvirt.


Why SNMP, modern monitoring systems usually have their own agent or checks to get data. You could use the rrd data already gathered and send it to influxdb or graphite. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/External_Metric_Server

Well SNMP is pretty standard, and we currently use PRTG. I've just started looking at the external metric server stuff, but seems a bit overkill.
 
We are not using libvirt.


Why SNMP, modern monitoring systems usually have their own agent or checks to get data. You could use the rrd data already gathered and send it to influxdb or graphite. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/External_Metric_Server

Is there any information on how to quickly setup something like Proxmox monitoring via Graphite? I found a page in the help files, but it doesnt say much...
 
You are wrong!

Are you sure?

If you monitor the physical CPU's on a hypervisor with 40 cores running 10 VM's each with different CPU allocations. You will get stats showing how the hypervisor is handling the load but you wont be able to see what percentage of CPU time is being allocated to each VM. Now if you install SNMP directly on each VM, then the stats you get will only reflect what that VM see's of the world.It wont know about any of the other VM's or the Hypervisor. So it might only have 1 CPU allocated which could be running at 100% utilization but you cannot see what percentage of physical CPU the VM is using, only the Hypervisor could tell you this. Which is why im asking if theres something like the livirt-snmp project which might work with proxmox.

I suggest you google livirt-snmp and then ask yourself why this might be needed. :)

You might also want to take a quick look at www.logicmonitor.com/blog/a-tale-of-two-metrics-windows-cpu-or-vcenter-vm-cpu/ - there's many other similar articles too which talk about how VM's measure CPU :)
 
If you monitor the physical CPU's on a hypervisor with 40 cores running 10 VM's each with different CPU allocations. You will get stats showing how the hypervisor is handling the load but you wont be able to see what percentage of CPU time is being allocated to each VM. Now if you install SNMP directly on each VM, then the stats you get will only reflect what that VM see's of the world.It wont know about any of the other VM's or the Hypervisor. So it might only have 1 CPU allocated which could be running at 100% utilization but you cannot see what percentage of physical CPU the VM is using, only the Hypervisor could tell you this. Which is why im asking if theres something like the livirt-snmp project which might work with proxmox.

If you have start from the beginning with this details, I have understood what you need. Now it is clear what you want to get and yoy are wright!
So sorry for my fault ..... ;)
 
I am interested in something very similar. I also use PRTG to monitor my entire network including the virtual hosts, but I want to find a way to monitor the customer status. To make sure in a machine hasn’t lost quorum. Any ideas?
 
I am interested in something very similar. I also use PRTG to monitor my entire network including the virtual hosts, but I want to find a way to monitor the customer status. To make sure in a machine hasn’t lost quorum. Any ideas?

Dont't know how to integrate custom checks into PRTG, but there are some in the Icinga / Nagios universe which you might want to have a look at. I've written for example a check which queries the PVE API for host and vm metrics including the cluster status.:

https://github.com/nbuchwitz/check_pve
 
I'm reawakening this topic.

It would be really useful to be able to monitor Proxmox VMs using SNMP on the server itself instead of having to configure SNMP for each VMs (although Ansible is a very good use for these cases).
Any plans for this?
 

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