Take note: at the moment of writing I am preparing to upgrade my Nutanix #vCommunity Edition to the latest version so I am still at version 20191030.415 of AHV. Also be aware that I can’t do any promises on if what I am doing is supported to do on your production Nutanix systems but as long as you don’t install any extra packages it’s just an ssh sessions that pulls some data.
Today I had a call with Samuel Legrand and a potential ControlUp customer where they had some questions about the Nutanix CVM resource usage. Because of that I tried to add the CVM of the Nutanix Community Edition in my lab and that resulted in this tweet:
Fun fact: yes you can add your @Nutanix CVM to the @ControlUp console using a Linux Data Collector and see what happens inside #NutanixNTC #vCommunity pic.twitter.com/VDfBrKT8FA
— Wouter Kursten (@Magneet_nl) October 8, 2020
So yes it’s possible to add the CVM as a monitored Linux Machine in ControlUp and it’s rather easy to do so. Let me show you what to do. To make sure that I don’t try to potentially mess with any CentOS packages I disable the installation of missing packages on Linux machines in the ControlUp console.
Next up is defining a (shared) credential I choose a shared credential so I get to see the data in Insights as well. You do this under Monitor Settings > Domain Identity
Click Add Credentials, use .\nutanix as username (so it’s seen as a local account and not a domain account), fill in the password and make sure the Friendly name is clear for what it is.
Next up we’ll actually add the machines by configuring a Linux Data Collector. Click Linux Data Collector in the ribbon, make up a name and select the credential you just created.
After this click add and use an IP range to scan or work with single IP’s, press scan and click add for the correct systems and hit ok.
Strongly advisable is select a dedicated data collector instead of the Console/Monitor this can be any system that has the ControlUp agent installed. In the Linux Data Collector screen click the arrow for the Connector Options, select ControlUp Console / Monitor and click remove.
Now click add and select the machine you want to use as data collector and click ok twice.
The machines will now be added to the bottom of the tree
Before the next screenshot I moved them into a folder but you can clearly see that things like OS, memory utilization are working. CPU is not and when we tried it with the production systems from the customer they actually gave an error this is most probably caused by the fact that not all required rpm’s are installed. It’s better than nothing though!
When drilling down on the machines to the processes it’s clear what the biggest consumers of processes are for the CVM.
And for Prism Central CE
So with this we could monitor the Nutanix pieces and create triggers for if or when one of the processes would become unavailable or when the entire machine goes down.