Monitoring VMWare with Nagios XI

It is quite easy to monitor VMWare infrastructures in Nagios XI. All you need to do is run the VMWare monitoring wizard, provided you had previously installed the VMWare Perl Software Development Kit (SDK) on the Nagios XI server.

Note: To learn how to install SDK, please, refer to our “Nagios XI – Monitoring VMWare” document.

From the Nagios XI web interface, click on the “Configure” menu and select “Run the Monitoring Wizard”. Scroll down to select the VMWare monitoring wizard. Enter the IP address of the VMWare server, login credentials, select what you would like to monitor (VMWare host or a guest), and click “Next” to proceed. In Step 3 of the wizard, you will have to select the metrics that you would like to monitor such as CPU Usage, Memory, Services, etc.

VMWare Monitoring Wizard - Nagios XI

If you chose to monitor VMWare guests in Step 2, you will see an extra option in Step 3 – a Guest Selection tab.

VMWare Monitoring Wizard - Nagios XI

When you click on it, you will be able to select which guests you would like to monitor.

VMWare Monitoring Wizard - Nagios XI

Note: The VMs that are powered on will be automatically selected.

You can run through each of the remaining steps of the wizard or just click on the “Finish” button to accept the defaults.

Congratulations! You are now monitoring your VMWare infrastructure in Nagios XI.

VMWare Host - Service Status - Nagios XI

Watch our tutorial video on Monitoring VMWare infrastructure with Nagios XI below:

3 Responses to “Monitoring VMWare with Nagios XI”


  • At first step I inserted guest VMs in to Nagios XI to monitor them. It was working fine. Then I removed them all, delete host and repeated the first step. But now I don’t see imported guest VMs.

    During the last step I got this error: “It appears as though the VMware SDK has not yet been installed on your Nagios XI server. You must install the SDK before you are able to use this wizard. “ I fix this with this commands:

    chown nagios.nagcmd /usr/local/nagiosxi/html/includes/configwizards/vmware/scripts/getguests.pl

    chmod 775 /usr/local/nagiosxi/html/includes/configwizards/vmware/scripts/getguests.pl

  • how to setting warning and critical level?

  • Dear Team,

    Yes, You are right its very simple to monitor vmware hosts and guests in to it.
    But we are facing issue with VMWare monitoring, please suggest on following.

    When guest has migrated from 1 to another host, existing guest machines are showing critical stat, even host and graphs are breaking……..

    host 1
    guest 19

    host 2
    guest 4

    after 3 days, 2 guest machines migrated from host1 to host2 due to resource policy.

    but we are facing issue with graphs and all services are critical. now this guest came into host2.

    Please suggest for migrated guest. how can we configured guest in host machine, so that after migration services should not be in CRITICAL Mode

    Thanks in advanced

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