While it is possible to monitor various aspects of virtual environments with current versions of Zabbix, it does require some time to set it all up and isn’t as integrated as it could be.
A more integrated experience for virtual environment monitoring is currently being considered for development. It might cover VMware, Xen, KVM (and possibly other environments), and include easy-to-set-up monitoring of both hypervisor and guest virtual machine statistics.
A common approach today is to monitor guest virtual machines using Zabbix agent in each of them. This does not cover virtualisation-specific metrics, and does not include hypervisor level monitoring, which has to be set up using extra functionality like external checks, user parameters or Zabbix sender. It works rather nicely, but doesn’t feel that native to Zabbix – and in larger environments there might be performance gains in a native solution as well.
Currently considered functionality includes:
- Support for VMware, Xen and KVM
- Monitoring hypervisor and guest virtual machine status using hypervisor API
- Management of the guest virtual machines from the Zabbix frontend
But to make this functionality powerful and easy to use some backing would be needed. Do you know a company that might be interested in partially financing an integrated virtual environment support? Let us know.
There already are several interested parties, and if there are enough of them, such development could be scheduled for Zabbix 2.2 already. A (partial) list of benefits sponsoring company would get:
- Close involvement in the specification drafting process
- Notifications of development progress
- Access to early development versions for testing
- Feedback being taken into serious consideration
- Co-marketing opportunities
Are you interested? Contact us (either by sending e-mail to sales /at/ zabbix /dot/ com or filling out the contact form) and we’ll let some more details of our grand plan slip.
(Japanese translation of this post)
It would be very nice being able to monitor kernel-based virtualizations as well (e.g. LXC, Linux Vserver, Solaris Containers).
About managing the virtual machines from Zabbix: There are already many solutions for managing virtual machines available (libvirt, OpenQRM, RedHat’s Enterprise Virtualization, etc.). Tons of them. Please consider that the integration of this kind of management functionality within a monitoring solution might introduce some unexpected problems for the existing tools.
indeed, additional virtualisation methods would be nice to support – but we have to start somewhere 🙂
if there will be large enough interest in those, surely additional support will appear later.
as for virtualisation management tools, zabbix won’t reimplement full management – most likely that would be simpler tasks like starting/stopping/pausing vms etc