Sergej Khackimullin, 123RF

Monitoring virtualization environments with Nagios and Icinga

Performance Check

Article from ADMIN 02/2010

By Bernd Erk

Special monitoring tools for the virtual environment help you keep on top of things.

Virtualization technology established itself in data centers many years ago and has its roots in host partitioning in the mainframe landscape. More than 35 years ago, IBM laid down the foundations with its mainframe logical partitions (LPARs). Today, data centers rely on virtualization, and many modern architecture concepts such as cloud computing would be unthinkable without it.

Because rolling out new virtual machines is easy, IT management best practices are sometimes ignored. For example, administrators forget to create Configuration Management Database (CMDB) entries or documentation, or they postpone monitoring indefinitely.

IT Service Must-Haves

Monitoring available resources and observing Service Level Agreements are some of the key competencies of IT operations that need to respond flexibly to new requirements. A variety of plugins exist for the free Nagios and Icinga monitoring systems to help administrators monitor today's virtualization solutions and identify long-term capacity bottlenecks.

In this article, I will introduce some solutions for monitoring virtualized environments and identifying changes.

What Should You Monitor?

The first question is: What makes a virtualized system so special? The fixed assignment of resources to a virtualized system seems to necessitate the same basic monitoring as a physical system. But, how do you define basic, and what do you really need to monitor at the operating system level?

To detect as well as to avoid failures, the hard disk typically offers the most potential. For this reason, you will want to monitor both the free space on disk and the I/O operations per second.

Nagios has a check_disk [1] plugin that identifies disk load and logs data for

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