vrops-exporter

Prometheus exporter to scrape metrics from vRealize Operations Manager

Running the exporter

The exporter consists of two main components:

• inventory

  The inventory retrieves all VMware resources by name and uuid from the vROps application interface, preserving the original parent-child relationships. Likewise, it reads the atlas config file to know all the DNS names of the vrops targets.

  • --user: specifiy user to log in
  • --password: specify password to log in
  • --port: specify inventory port
  • --atlas: path to atlas config file
  • --v: logging all level except debug
  • --vv: logging all level including debug
  • --loopback: use 127.0.0.1 address instead of listen to 0.0.0.0 (for test purpose)
  • --sleep: how often the resources are updated, default: 1800s

  atlas refers to our netbox extractor, which is in the end providing netbox data as a configmap in k8s. You don't have to use it, a json file with this structure would be sufficient, too. If case the WSGI server can't be connected to you might want to try --loopback to hook up the loopback interface (127.0.0.1).

  [
    {
        "labels": {
            "job": "vrops",
            "server_name": "vrops.dns.address",
        }
    },
    { }
  ]

• exporter

  The exporter can be started with a specific target and/or a specific collector and/or specific rubric (rubrics defined in the collector config). This is important to provide smaller and also faster exporters in the landscape.

  • --port: specify exporter port
  • --inventory: inventory service address
  • --config: path to config to set default collectors, statkeys and properties for collectors
  • --target: define target vrops
  • --collector: enable collector (use multiple times)
  • --rubric: metric rubric in collector config
  • --v: logging all level except debug
  • --vv: logging all level including debug

  An example collector-config. Add the desired statkeys and properties that your collectors should collect in a dedicated category. This is where pairs of a statkey and a metric_suffix are described. The statkey follows VMware notation and the metric_suffix follows best practices as it should appear in prometheus.

  Metrics: VMWARE Documentation | Metrics for vCenter Server Components

  Properties: VMWARE Documentation | Properties for vCenter Server Components

  Prometheus: Prometheus | Metric and label naming

  In the past, the two parts were in one startup script (exporter.py), but this didn't really work, because restarting the exporter always had to wait for a complete rebuild of the inventory.

  Therefore, one part permanently builds the inventory and makes it available to the exporter. The exporter fetches the data via HTTP requests and uses them to execute the actual vROps queries.

1. Build

   To build the container simply run make and get the locally created docker container.

2. CLI

   Either specify the vars via environment or cli params. Because the inventory and the exporter are running seperately, you need to enter the Docker container at least twice. Start the container:

   docker run -it keppel.eu-de-1.cloud.sap/ccloud/vrops_exporter /bin/sh
   

   This will start the container and directly enter the shell. Start the inventory:

   ./inventory.py --user foobaruser --password "foobarpw" --atlas /atlas/netbox.json --port 80 --vv
   

   Now you need to enter the container a second time:

   docker exec -it <container_name> /bin/sh
   

   Now run the exporter:

   ./exporter.py --port 9000 --inventory localhost --config tests/collector_config.yaml --target 'vrops-vcenter-test.company.com' --vv
   

   You can also enter the container a third time to fetch the prometheus metrics from localhost (i.e. with wget)

3. Enviroment variables

    USER
    PASSWORD
    PORT
    INVENTORY
    LOOPBACK
   

For running this in kubernetes (like we do), you might want to have a look at our helm chart

Architecture

Test

Test module is called using ENV variables. Specifying these on the fly would look like this:

Main test:

LOOPBACK=0 DEBUG=0 INVENTORY=127.0.0.1:8000 USER=FOO PASSWORD=Bar CONFIG=tests/collector_config.yaml TARGET=testhost.test python3 tests/TestCollectors.py

To run all tests you got to loop over it.

for i in $(ls tests/Test*)
do
  LOOPBACK=1 INVENTORY="127.0.0.1:8000" DEBUG=0 USER=FOO PASSWORD=Bar python3 $i
done

Please note that USER and PASSWORD are currently doing nothing at all, they are only passed on because the test checks whether these are present.

The test generates dummy return values for the queries to vROps and checks the functionality of the collectors. It compares whether the metrics as a result of the collector match the expected metrics in metrics.yaml.