brain-dump/sysadmin/vmware/snmp-vcenter-vcsa.md

Enabling SNMP Monitoring on vCenter VCSA

Enable network monitoring on the vCenter server appliance for monitors like PRTG.

First, enable SSH in the vCenter Appliance Manager (this is not the normal vCenter dashboard); typically https://vcenter.example.com:5480 - login using root and not your Active Directory user.

• Access > SSH Login and Bash Shell both need to be Enabled

Then, open a terminal and login using root:

ssh root@vcenter.example.com

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Stay inside the > Command prompt

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Check the current SNMP status:

snmp.get

You'll see:

Enable: False
Users:
Notraps: ''
Privacy: none
Loglevel: warning
V3targets:
Pid: n/a
Syslocation: ''
Targets:
Communities: ''
Remoteusers:
Authentication: none
Processlist: False
Engineid: ''
Port: 161
Syscontact: ''

Setup

Set your community string (I used public for mine):

snmp.set --communities public

Enter your monitoring host (who will probe for the SNMP stuff), followed by the SNMP port they'll listen on (mine is 161; the default SNMP port) and SNMP string they're allowed to probe - my host is 172.16.0.2:

snmp.set --targets 172.16.0.2@161/public

You can optionally separate multiple hosts by a comma: snmp.set --targets 172.16.0.2@161/public,10.0.0.1@161/public

Set your desired log level (lowercase); options: :

snmp.set --loglevel warning

Check your setup:

snmp.get

If all looks well, enable it:

snmp.enable