Scrape the status of VMWare Tools.

[yagyans...@gmail.com]

Hi. So, I want to scrape the status(Running/Not Running) of vmware-tools service running on all my VMWare servers. For CentOS 7, its pretty straight forward using the systemd collector but for CentOS 6, I am in bit of a pickle. Since, node exporter is running on all my servers, easiest solution would be to create a small bash script and export its output for textfile collector but that would require a cron to be added for the script to give the data continuously.

Is there any way to achieve this without putting a cron for the script? For example, in the Nagios based Check_MK monitoring agent, any script that is put under /etc/check_mk folder is self evaluated at every scrape.

Is cron the best solution, or something better can be done here?

[Brian Candler]

exporter_exporter has the ability to run scripts in response to scrapes.  You'd have to install it on every node where you want to run scripts.

nrpe_exporter talks to nrped so you can scrape actual nagios plugins, but you need to build from master branch if you want SSL as there has been no tagged release for ages - plus you need to build against an old version of OpenSSL.  You'd only need to install one central instance.

You can decide for yourself whether these are easier than creating a text file from a cron job. 

[yagyans...@gmail.com]

Thanks a lot, Brain.

nrpe_exporter looks interesting. Will explore the same.