I was asked to set up a report on newly created Guest VMs and show the configured resources for the guest VM. I found the canned report for this, but I am not able to report the amount of configured storage for the Guest VM. I found the column heading "Total Storage Size" under the Virtual Machine object. When I add this to the report, the field is empty for all of the Guest VMs listed in the report. Is this the correct column to be reporting on or is there a better one to use?
Need to report on configured storage per guest VM for newly created Guest VMs
"vmStatsProvider" causing Solarwinds to give false "down" alerts?
Hi Everyone,
Does anyone have experience Solarwinds giving false "down" alerts on with virtual servers?
It happened on a server yesterday morning, twice. We received alerts from Solarwinds that a particular server was down around 7:00 and 8:00 AM.
In looking at the application logs for that time on the server I spied numerous line items:
Information | 10/9/2014 7:08 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 7:08 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 7:06 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 7:06 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:57 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:57 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:55 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:55 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:46 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:46 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. |
If I understand this correctly these are coming from the VMWare tools that is installed on the virtual instance?
Can this be causing Solarwinds to see the server being down?
Thanks everyone,
Cheryl
High Percent Co-Stop (%CSTP)
Co-Stop (%CSTP) is the percentage of time that a SMP virtual machine was ready to run, but incurred delay due to co-vCPU scheduling contention. To remedy Co-Stop on a VM, decrease the number of vCPUs on that VM. If there are multiple VMs with high %CSTP on a host, it is likely a sign of CPU contention and resource starvation due too many vSMP VMs on that host. Migrate some of those VMs off to other hosts to re-balance the load in the cluster and also, decrease the number of vCPUs allocated to those VMs to see if the %CSTP goes to zero.
VM CPU Co-stop (%CSTP) Alert in Virtualization Manager | VM CPU Co-Stop Alert Viewer in Virtualization Manager |
---|---|
Haprdware details not polling in ESX host
Hi, We have a ESX server in Vmware5.5 version. We are able to poll all the data including host servers except hardware details. In the hardware details we are getting the error as Hardware polling failed: Polling of chassis (CIM_Chassis class) failed. The operation has timed out. Can some one please help me why this is happening.
Puppet and Solarwinds integration
Has anyone had any experience in adding information from Puppet to Solarwinds using facter snmp integration?
How did you go about it (i.e., what did you do on the Puppet side and on the Solarwinds side)?
Option to Monitor Datastores grey'd Out in NPM
Virtualisation - Hyper-V polling using SNMP? Or must it be WMI at the expense of Dell Disk Information
Hi all,
I'm relatively new to Solarwinds and would like to expand our Hyper-V virtualisation monitoring. However, I can see that our Hyper-V Virtualisation page is thread bare with only two servers listed and yet I can tell you that we have about 200 Hyper-V hosts.
Doing some preliminary checks and it looks like the Machine Type is the differentiating factor with some host being correctly identified as Hyper-V servers.
From what I can see, Hyper-V must be selected under the resources page for a given node but it appears that this can only be achieved through WMI polling. Can someone please confirm this to be the case?
This leads me onto the second part of this discussion, most of our Servers are Dell and in order to get complete disk information these physical servers must be polled by SNMP. So it would appear that it is impossible to monitor a Dell Server Environment whilst obtaining both complete physical disk information and also making the environment Hyper-V aware?
Any advice, guidance or ideas appreciated.
Performance Metric Definitions
I'm working on definitions for the metrics being monitored with VMAN. I have a few questions about them too. This is the list I have so far:
CPU Used: Percentage utilization of CPU resources.
source:
CPU Usage: Measured in MHz for the amount of CPU Usage.
source:
CPU Swap Wait: Swap wait time is time spent waiting for memory to be swapped in. When the VM is waiting for memory, it is not doing work.
CPU Ready: CPU Ready Time is a vSphere metric that records the amount of time a virtual machine is ready to use CPU but was unable to schedule time because all CPU resources (on a ESX host) are busy.
source: http://houseofbrick.com/cpu-ready-time-blog-part-i/
CPU Max Limited: Sys|Resource CPU Max Limited (%) (1 min. average) Percent of resource CPU that is limited to the maximum
amount. Average value during a one-minute period.
CPU Load (On Host): Percentage of CPU utilization on the host.
source:
CPU Load: Percentage of CPU utilization by the guest os.
source:
CPU Latency: Percentage of time the VM is unable to run because it is contending for access to the physical CPUs.
CPU Demand: This metric is an indicator of the overall demand for CPU resources by the workloads in the cluster. It shows the percentage of CPU resources that all the virtual machines might use if there were no CPU contention or CPU limits set. It represents the average active CPU load in the past five minutes.
Memory Usage (On Host): Percentage utilization of Memory resources on the host.
source:
Memory Usage: Percentage utilization of Memory resources on the guest os.
source:
Memory Granted: Amount of memory available for use.
Memory Demand: Guest operating system demand in kilobytes
source:
Consumed Percent Memory Load:
source:
Consumed Memory Load:
source:
Balloon Memory Load: This metric shows the amount of memory currently used by the
virtual machine memory control. It is only defined at the VM level
Do these definitions make sense to anyone and are there any that should be updated for what VMAN is actually reporting? I am also seeing a weird thing. My Memory Usage, Memory Granted, Memory Demand, Consumed Percent Memory Load, and Consumed Memory Load are all reporting 0 or --. Which doesn't make sense because I know the VM is using memory. Anyone have ideas as to why that may be? Thanks for your time and hope someone gets a little use out of having these definitions.
Vcenter not polling in VMan
Hi,
In our Orion VMan we have enabled vmware polling in some of the vcenters. Of those in one of the Vcenters we are getting the error like " Error while connecting to VMware device - There was no endpoint listening at https://<IPaddress>/sdk that could accept the message. This is often caused by an incorrect address or SOAP action. See InnerException, if present, for more details."
When we try to test the credentials in the Poll for VMware in the Add node page getting the error as "Test Failed. ScheduleVMwareCredentialsTestProbeJobs failed, check fault information." The user which I am trying to test is having admin privilege in the vcenter.
Can some one help me to resolve this.
Regards,
Sreenath
Unable to access the VMAN console
Hello,
Just trying my luck if someone could also experienced my issue in VMAN console. I upgraded my VMAN to the latest version but unfortunately, when I was trying to access the VMAN console in order to configure the license, I've noticed that my VMAN console is only loading and I received an error "Invalid Server response" when I tried to use the network setting? (https://ipaddress:5480).
VMware issue scanner in Virtualization Manager
Virtualization Manager is already packed with great monitoring capabilities for the VMware (or Hyper-V) virtualized infrastructure. But there could be always better information that leads to higher availability or more secured datacenters. What I like about the entire Solarwinds product portfolio are rich customization possibilities and this does not exclude VMAN. Anytime VMware engineer or admin receives "down" or "critical" alert from the VMAN and starts troubleshoot the problem, yet probably already thinking of: "why that happened?" or "how can I make sure this won't happen again?". Successful fix leads usually to validation if such configuration issue is not present on rest of the infrastructure, but usually, it takes hours and hours to validate.
Also, where do you go and seek for the answer if you exactly don't know what to do? Yes, to Google to seek for "ESXi PSOD error xyz", "host is performance issues" or similar. Not surprisingly many times the answer leads to VMware knowledge base , and you are lucky that somebody else had and solved the problem before. When I spot Runecast Analyzer for the first time, I thought this would be a great extension of Solarwinds VMAN so it tells you not only what's UP, what's running out of resources but also what can go wrong with your setup. At the present, such KB search is a bit more difficult, because Google no longer indexes VMware KB IDs and it is harder to find the "how-to" for patching the system.
For that purpose, I would like to share with you a simple customization of VMAN dashboard which ads visibility into all critical issues which already happened to someone and can happen on your systems too. The new custom resource connects to the Runecast Analyzer tool and gives the Virtualization Manager visibility into all potential VMware issues/KBs (availability, security, best-practices). Why I find this useful? Because VMAN tells me what is the critical part of my virtualized infrastructure with all important business (micro)services and Runecast scan tells me what can happen and how to fix the problem.
The result may look like this:
The integration is using Solarwinds custom HTML resource and Runecast Analyzer API. You can download an example of the integration from the content exchange: SW_RA integration v1.0.html
What do you think, does such a "VMware issue scanner" integration help in your virtualized IT world?
VMAN, ESXi, vCenter
There don't seem to be videos on adding ESXi hosts to Solarwinds for monitoring. Also are there any recommendations as to what to monitor for ESXi 6.5? Any KB articles on grouping ESXi hosts and creating alerts?
"vmStatsProvider" causing Solarwinds to give false "down" alerts?
Hi Everyone,
Does anyone have experience Solarwinds giving false "down" alerts on with virtual servers?
It happened on a server yesterday morning, twice. We received alerts from Solarwinds that a particular server was down around 7:00 and 8:00 AM.
In looking at the application logs for that time on the server I spied numerous line items:
Information | 10/9/2014 7:08 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 7:08 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 7:06 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 7:06 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:57 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:57 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:55 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:55 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:46 | vmStatsProvider | 256 | General | The "vmStatsProvider" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. WMI namespace: "root\cimv2". | |||||||||
Information | 10/9/2014 6:46 | vmStatsProvider | 258 | Guest Library API | The "vmGuestLibrary" is successfully initialized for this Virtual Machine. |
If I understand this correctly these are coming from the VMWare tools that is installed on the virtual instance?
Can this be causing Solarwinds to see the server being down?
Thanks everyone,
Cheryl
Monitoring C drive on VDI Machine's without Monitoring the guest
Hi All,
We have well over 2000 VDI's and noticed a VDI will fail if thie C drive gets filled up.
We have VMAN, SRM, SAM, NPM, NCM and NTA
Does anyone know anyway we can get the disk information without monitoring the VDI through WMI. I really don't want 2000 + Windows PC's in Solarwinds to keeping going up and down and chopping and changes as users log into VDI.
Is there any other way through, vSphere events or ESXI etc to get this? Maybe even getting a windows build to forward an event to vCentre or Solarwinds when the C is nearly full? I just really don't want to have individual VDI Guests in monitoring.
Many Thanks,
Grant
Can someone explain what this mean on the node details for a VM?
VMAN Orion virtualization polling is not supported on agent. If you want to poll the node via agent, you need to manually switch the polling type for the node to 'Basic' on the Virtualization Polling Settings page in order to poll also virtualization data.
Custom Report - All VMs by Host With Summary
Hello all,
I'm trying to create a report to list all VM guests, grouped by the VM host they are currently on.
I've managed to do this by grouping the table by Virtual Host - Host Name. So far each host it simply shows the Host Name.
What I would like to do is to have a header for each Host, so I can show the CPU Count, RAM etc in the host. In a footer, I'd like to count the CPUs / RAM allocated to the guests.
Is this something that will need SWQL?
Thanks,
Chris.
Vcenter status unknown in VMan
Hi,
In our VMan vcenters are showing as grayed out with description Node status unknown. While checking the Virtualization settings Polling status is shown as Polling with Polling method VMAN Orion enabled. Also the credentials used for VMware polling is working and testing is successful.
Can some one help me to know what can be the reason for this. We are using VMan 8.4
Can you remove the storage tab from the node details view for physical servers?
So we have recently deployed Solarwinds Orion and I have managed to manipulate most of the customization we would like. What I have noticed is on the node details page, the storage tab seems to be tied to virtual servers and the IOPS and latnecy windows are "dead" on a physical server. We dont want anything that looks unconfigured or broke, so I would like to remove the "storage" tab from the physical servers. The "show this tab" options are pretty lame if you ask me, needs more options....
First attempt, I removed the IOPS and Latency panes using the customize page option....but that removed it from all servers.
Second attempt, from the storage tab options I tried a "view limitation" - selected vmware servers thinking it would only affect the storage tab, and would only show that tab for hardware matching vmware.
Wrong. After that setting, all nodes, devices...everything would not allow you to view the details....said access denied.
So I removed that view limitation from the database and got my details back.
There has to be an easier way to get rid of this storage tab for some servers and leave for others but I have yet to find it or any clue in documentation/forums...
Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks.
Hardware Monitoring for ESXI Servers
Hi All,
Whether VMAN has a capable of monitoring power,fan and temperature of esxi servers?
No VM search in Virtualization Summary page
We have Virtualization Manager 8.1 in Orion. No separate appliance. There doesn't appear to be a way to search for a VM on the Summary page. If I don't know what host a VM is on it can be a long process to find. Is there someway to do this?