README.md
1Icinga Web 2 module for vSphere
2===============================
3
4In case you want to have an automated import of your Virtual Machines and/or
5Physical Host from **VMware Sphere** (vCenter) into your Icinga monitoring
6system this module might be what you have been looking for.
7
8At the time of this writing, the main purpose of this module is being a
9Import Source provider for the [Icinga Director](https://github.com/Icinga/icingaweb2-module-director):
10
11[](doc/03-Import-Source.md)
12
13
14Documentation
15-------------
16
17### Basics
18* [Installation](doc/01-Installation.md)
19* [Define an Import Source](doc/03-Import-Source.md)
20* [Working on the CLI](doc/04-CLI-Commands.md)
21* [Contributing](doc/81-Contributing.md)
22* [Changelog](doc/84-Changelog.md)
23
24Compatibility
25-------------
26
27This module has no dependency on any SDK library. It had been written from
28scratch for vCenter 6.x and tested with different installations of vCenter 6.0.
29Directly accessing ESXi 6.5 hosts also worked fine. We expect it to work fine
30also with older versions, but had no access to such for tests so far. In case
31you have, please let us know!
32
33Performance
34-----------
35
36This module should perform well. Here are some numbers showing resources spent
37when fetching 2600+ VMs. The initial login took 430ms, then 2.6 seconds have
38been needed to fetch all the data, and it took additional 350ms to process this
39data. There is still room for optimizations, we for example implemented a Cookie
40(session) cache, but disabled it for now. For the current task (being an Import
41Source) this should easily be fast enough:
42
43 +---------------------------+----------+----------+------------+-------------+
44 | Description | Off (ms) | Dur (ms) | Mem (diff) | Mem (total) |
45 +---------------------------+----------+----------+------------+-------------+
46 | Bootstrap ready | 0.005 | 0.005 | 486.82 KiB | 486.82 KiB |
47 | Dispatching CLI command | 11.752 | 11.747 | 526.72 KiB | 1013.54 KiB |
48 | Preparing the API | 14.836 | 3.084 | 413.77 KiB | 1427.30 KiB |
49 | Logged in, ready to fetch | 444.801 | 429.965 | -4.08 KiB | 11.80 MiB |
50 | Got 4696738 bytes | 3055.117 | 2610.316 | 9.00 MiB | 20.81 MiB |
51 | Got 2633 VMs | 3411.375 | 356.258 | 14.30 MiB | 35.11 MiB |
52 | Mapped properties | 3411.393 | 0.018 | 896.00 B | 35.11 MiB |
53 | Logged out | 3415.851 | 0.060 | -4.27 KiB | 26.15 MiB |
54 +---------------------------+----------+----------+------------+-------------+
55
56Please always make sure to fire your requests against your vCenter. Directly
57querying your ESXi hosts will work, but you should then expect to be way slower.
58
59Future Directions
60-----------------
61
62We'd love to see this module grow. By giving it a little local DB schema and a
63lightweight daemon it could synchronize configuration, state and performance
64data in a resource-efficient way. Monitoring checks could then directly use that
65data and/or passively react to events. Additionally, this data would allow for
66some nice new visualizations for the Icinga Web 2 GUI.
67
