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vCenter Inventory

The vCenter inventory plugin connects BigPanda to your vCenter Server enriching incoming alerts with your up-to-date infrastructure information.

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Supported Versions

Type

Authentication Type

vCenter Server 6.5 update 2 and newer

Local Plugin

Bearer Token

Key Features

  • Enriches alerts in BigPanda with topology information from vCenter Inventory export of hosts and virtual machines.
  • Schedule automatic exports of the vCenter Inventory.
  • Automatically creates and manages Enrichments in BigPanda.

How it Works

The BigPanda vCenter Inventory integration works by registering a local plugin with your vCenter Server. Within the Configuration page of the plugin, one can set a schedule for how frequently to export data to BigPanda. All host and virtual machine inventory data is then transmitted to BigPanda for processing and transformation into a BigPanda enrichment which then immediately starts enriching your incoming alerts.

🚧

The vCenter plugin is only supported on Linux boxes.

Windows support is coming soon.

Installing the Integration

Prerequisites

  • Admin access to the vCenter Server

Registering the plugin with vCenter Server

  1. Download the vSphere Client SDK (version 6.7 update 3)
  2. Using the terminal or command prompt, navigate to CLIENT_SDK/tools/vCenter plugin registration/prebuilt
  3. Run the following command to register the BigPanda Plugin with your vCenter Server.
    • Make sure to input the vCenter Server IP or FQDN as well as a user and password to access the server.
    • Make sure to use the correct script (shell/bash) based on the OS you are running.
./extension-registration.sh -action registerPlugin -local \
-n BigPanda \
-c BigPanda \
-v 1.0.2 \
-k io.bigpanda.vcenter \
-s "BigPanda export plugin" \
-pu https://bp-bin.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/integrations/vcenter/latest/bigpanda-plugin.zip \
-st E8:EE:A0:D0:24:8E:9C:2E:DE:11:82:37:25:83:DA:D7:5B:D0:50:4C \
-url <https://VCENTER_IP_OR_FQDN/sdk> \
-u <USER> \
-p <PASSWORD>
  1. Log out and back into the vCenter Server. A new user session triggers the download of any newly registered plugin.
  2. The BigPanda Plugin should now be present in the shortcut menu. If it does not appear, don't worry, just wait another few seconds and refresh your browser.

Configure the integration

The integration configuration page needs just a few inputs for it to start exporting the vCenter Inventories to BigPanda.

Input

Description

Bearer Token

Required. Access token from the BigPanda Console

Endpoint

Optional. Endpoint for the export of data

Default: BigPanda integration endpoint

Username

Required. vCenter username with read-only access

This user should be a local user to vCenter often denoted with the @vsphere.local suffix

Password

Required. Password for the user

Export Period

Required. Represents the interval at which the export should be done

Values: Hourly, Daily, Weekly

Export Frequency

Required. Represents how often within the interval should the export occur

Value: number
Example:
export period: Daily
export frequency: 5
This will perform an export of the data every 5 days

Field Renaming

Optional. If you would like to rename the default field names, one can provide a list of here

Example:
host: server
vcenter_server: vcenter

Blacklist

Optional. A comma-delimited list of properties to remove from the inventory export.

Example:
vcenter_server, storage_size, storage_free_space

📘

Username and Password

The username and password fields are required for the plug-in to be able to perform inventory retrieval when a user is not logged in.

When assigning the Read-Only Role to the user ensure the Propagate to children is checked. If it is not, the user will fail to authenticate.

The password is encrypted on a local configuration file within the vCenter server and is never shared outside to BigPanda.

Enrichment Data

Once the export is successful, BigPanda will process and create two BigPanda enrichment schemas. One for all Hosts and the other for all Virtual Machines.

Host Enrichment Map

Below are all the tags that will be added to each BigPanda Alert where the host tags match

Enrichment Tag

Description

host

The name of the vSphere host

physical_host

Duplicate of host value

vcenter_server

The name of the vCenter Server

cluster

The name of the cluster this host is in

vm_list

A list of all the Virtual Machines in this host

datastores

A list of all datastores this host has access to

cpu_cores

Number of CPU cores

cpu_usage

Percentage of CPU utilization

memory_size

Size of memory in GB's

memory_usage

Percentage of memory utilization

storage_size

Total storage capacity for this host

Note: This is an aggregate of all storage capacity for the datatstores this host has access to

storage_free_space

Total free storage for this host

Note: This is an aggregate of all free storage available across all the datatstores this host has access to

Virtual Machine Enrichment Map

Below are all the tags that will be added to each BigPanda Alert where the host tags match

Enrichment Tag

Description

host

The name of the virtual machine

physical_host

The name of the vSphere host where this virtual machine lives

vcenter_server

The name of the vCenter Server

cluster

The name of the cluster where the physical_host resides

cpus

The number of CPU cores available to this virtual machine

memory

The amount of memory available for this virtual machine ( in GB's)

storage

The total amount of storage committed to this virtual machine across all datastores

guestos

The operating system installed on this virtual machine

ip_adress

The IP Address associated with this virtual machine

Uninstalling the Integration

Unregister the plugin

  • Using the same SDK that was used to register the plugin, run the following command to unregister it.
    • Make sure to use the correct script (shell / bash) based on the OS you are running on.
./extension-registration.sh -action unregisterPlugin \
-k io.bigpanda.vcenter \
-url <https://VCENTER_IP_OR_FQDN/sdk> \
-u <USER> \
-p <PASSWORD>

Removing plugin files

The unregister process does not remove the plugin files from vCenter. This process would need to be done manually.

  • Log into the shell window of the vCenter Server and navigate to /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/vc-packages/vsphere-client-serenity/
  • Remove the directory io.bigpanda.vcenter-<VERSION>
  • Navigate to /usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-ui/server/ and remove the bigpanda-config.txt file
  • To flush the vCenter Server from any caches files it's recommended to restart the vSphere UI.
> export VMAFD_CLI="/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli"
# This command will restart the UI within the vCenter Server
> vmon-cli -r vsphere-ui

Release Notes

v1.0.2 (11/20/20)

  • Fixed validation of property when attempting to cast to Object Types

v1.0.1 (9/13/20)

  • Added datastores field to Host mapping enrichment
  • Added datastores and ip_address fields to Virtual Machines mapping enrichment
  • Fixed a bug causing the configuration UI to potentially hang
  • Fixed a bug causing authentication to sometimes fail

v1.0.0

  • Initial release 🎉

Updated about 1 month ago