Unless my Google skills are seriously on the decline I wasn’t able to find a definitive post on correctly setting up a nagios user to facilitate esx_checks for monitoring systems such as OpsView and similar Nagios based systems.

For our ESXi monitoring we have chosen to use the OS – vSphere Service Checks. Post here on how to get the OpsView side going. Having a look at the checks in OpsView you see the following checks are used

Our current ESXi 4.1 hosts where working a treat, and this being my first time adding new hosts to the monitoring set, I was confronted with the following errors via Nagstamon:

So, to get the reporting up the following actions need to be taken on the ESXi host.

  • Log into the host directly with the VI Client
  • Go to the Local Users & Groups Tab
  • Add/Modify the nagios user and set the password
  • Add the user to the users group and click ok
  • On the Permissions tab and Add a new permission for the nagios user as Read-Only.

If you want you can run the commands to test access directly from the cli of the OpsView system.

Alerts are gone and we are good to move onto the next job…finally!