[hobbit] monitoring xen machine status from Dom0

[Tom Georgoulias]

T.J. Yang wrote:

>> Has anyone started thinking about or working on script(s) to monitor 
>> xen machines from the Dom0?  It would be nice to have some of the data 
>> that xentop and other tools display in Hobbit and I would rather work 
>> with others on this list to develop the scripts rather than do 
>> everything on my own, if possible.
> 
> I don't have need for Xen hb monitoring so far.  Instead I do like to 
> see my Free VMWare server got measured/graphed by hobbit server using 
> VMWare's perl API. Example, like how many session are running  etc.

Monitoring the xen virtual machines by running a hobbit client within 
those virtual machines is easy and something I'm already doing.  It 
works fine pretty much out of the box.

I have noticed that the network charts under the trends column of the 
server that is hosting all of the xen virtual machines gets pretty 
cluttered as VMs are stopped and started, because xen assigns them a new 
domain ID each time (similar to a process ID) and that causes new 
network interfaces to show up in the charts (under the names 
vif<id>.<nic ID>).  Start and stop VMs about ten times and you are 
looking at a chart with interfaces like vif1.0, vif2.0, vif3.0.....  It 
gets crazy.  :)

I thought it would be useful to have additional data about the impact of 
those virtual machines on the server that is hosting them, and one easy 
way to gather that data would be add a client side ext script that would 
run the xentop command in a batch mode, then send it over to the hobbit 
server for processing by the NCV module or just as a status report.

Tom
-- 
Tom Georgoulias
Sr. Systems Engineer
McClatchy Interactive
tomg at mcclatchyinteractive.com