ESXi-exporter

Prometheus exporter, which utilises the VMware SDK and SSH to get metrics from VMware ESXi-HostSystems.

About

This exporter contains a critical service collector and a overall state collector. It monitors the service state of services like hostd or ntpd and gathers the ESXi-HostSystem overallState from vCenters.

Getting started

1. Configure the project
   • Credentials are passed by environment variables.
   • config.yaml contains some static configuration
   • There are command-line options for more console output
2. Run exporter.py with python3

Environment variables

• VCENTER_USER the vCenter username.
• VCENTER_PASSWORD the vCenter password.
• VCENTER_MPW if set, master_password mechanism will be used.
• ESXI_USER the ESXi-host ssh username.
• ESXI_PASSWORD the ESXi-host ssh password.
• ATLAS_FILE the path to the atlas file containing esxi_hosts and vcenters.
• CONFIG_FILE path to config file.

Command-line arguments

• -v sets logger to info output
• -vv sets logger to debug output

Atlas

https://github.com/sapcc/atlas

This is an atlas scheme reduced to the information required by this exporter.

[
  {
    "labels": {
      "job": "vmware-esxi or vcenter",
      "name": "",
      "server_name": "",
      "status": "Active",
      "site": ""
    }
  },
]

Structure

• All collectors inherit from the BaseCollector
• Interfaces are used to provide a common exchange data type. Eg it defines how a Host and a Vcenter should be passed around. (the term interface is used as in Angular/Typescript vocabular)
• Modules provide shared core functionality
  • api → very basic functionality. Enables connectivity to ESXi-hosts etc. They are designed in an interchangeable manner. See helpers which are some kind of wrapper.
  • helper → Are some kind of wrapper which combine different APIs in order to provide a unified interface. If an api-file gets interchanged, the helper/wrapper still expects the same format as before. For instance if you want to use a different SSH-library than paramiko then change the ssh-api-file in the api folder and make sure it still returns the console output of the remote host as before.
  • configuration → some small models that collect configuration from yaml, environment and commandline arguments in order to provide configuration in a dynamic and scoped manner to specific parts of the exporter.
• exporter.py is the entry point. It dynamicly invokes collectors based on the configuration and sets up the whole program.