Configure XenServer for SNMP

Monitoring your virtualization cluster is very important. I mean, they run most of your critical servers for crying out loud right? Well besides VMWare in my company's environment, we also have XenServer. Since we just added another node to our XenServer cluster I thought I would write about how to configure it for SNMP monitoring.

• SSH into your XenServer
• Edit: /etc/sysconfig/iptables with your favorite text editor. (I like nano)
• Add the following lines AFTER the line “-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp –dport 5353 -d 224.0.0.251 -j ACCEPT”
  -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp --dport 161 -j ACCEPT
  -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp --dport 123 -j ACCEPT 
• Execute: service iptables restart
• Edit: /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf with your favorite text editor
• Replace the community with your current SNMP community if you have one.
  # sec.name source community
  com2sec notConfigUser default public
• Execute: chkconfig snmpd on
• Execute: service snmpd restart

That's it, now you should be able to do an SNMP walk using your monitoring software. We happen to use Zenoss Core and it is able to pick up everything we need to monitor our XenServers!

What do you use for monitoring? Do you like it? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.

[Via Gimpland]