Some time ago i wrote a post on how to forward vCenter alarms to Zabbix ( https://blog.fawcs.info/2015/05/getting-vcenter-alarms-to-zabbix/) and I have to admit, that this solutions is kind of a pain in the ass. I’m getting the alarm info from environmental varaibles which are automatically set by the vCenter when an alarm changes its status, but it seems that there is a “littel” problem with “overlapping” alarms. For example if there are occuring multiple alarms within a short period only the first alarm will be forwarded to zabbix, but non of the follwoing alarms. Besides that this is not an ideal solution I personally do not like my former approach because it’s an event driven approach. So if one event goes missing we have an inconsistent system :/
It’s quite some time since I wanted to redesign the solution and now I’m finally having some time ( and the pressure) to do so. 🙂
The new approach is based on using userparameters to execute a powershellscript on the vCenter to discover all active alarms and create items in Zabbix. At the moment I’m creating three item prototyes. One for the Timestamp when the alarm became active, another item for the acknowledged-state of the alarm and the last one for the severity of the alarm.
There are two userparemeters which run two powershell scripts. The first one (vcenter.alarm.polling.discovery.ps1) does the discovery and the second one (vcenter.alarm.polling.itemdata.ps1) is to get the data for the discoverd items.
There are also three triggers (one for each severity gray, yellow, red) which will be active als long as the alarm is not acknowledged.
You can download the scripts, userparameters and the template down below:
vCenterAlarmPolling
Additional findings:
Ther can occure problems if there are different addresses used to connect to the vcenter (eg. 127.0.0.1, loclahost, vcenterhostname, …)
It seems that the vCenter creates a sperate datacenter instance for every connection, so if you use the three examples from abovve you will end up creating three instances and mess up the script.
If special characters want to be passed to the powershellscript (e.g. special chars in passwords ord login with administrator@vsphere.local) the “UnsafeUserParameters=1” – parameter from the zabbix-agent.conf needs to be set to 1. (default value is 0)
