VMware vCenter and SNMP monitoring support with Sysorb

I recently had a case at a customer site, where they wanted to use Sysorb to monitor their VMware vSphere environment. I wrote this article, as I couldn’t find any useful information on Sysorb and VMware vSphere together.

SNMP was configured on the ESX servers and VMware vSphere MIBS was imported into the Sysorb tool.

However trying the same for the vCenter server, didn’t give the expected results. I configured some vCenter configuration alarms to test alarms to verify that SNMP trap where sent out. The Alarms and Event tab in vCenter stated that the SNMP trap was sent, however none were received in Sysorb.
I then installed trap receiver from trapreceiver.com and verified through this tool that the alarms where actually sent out and received from the vCenter server.

I wasn’t familiar with how Sysorb was working and had to read up and investigate how it used SNMP to monitor their server and network devices. I found that Sysorb is NOT supporting SNMP traps, but only works through the SNMP GET function. Basically what this means is, that the Sysorb tool was polling the target for status on preconfigured thresholds/triggers in the Sysorb tool.

Since vCenter itself monitors for configured alarms/thresholds/triggers and therefore sending out an SNMP trap if configured, the 2 systems would not work properly together.

I looked in the VMware vSphere documentation for support for SNMP GET and it was stated that support for SNMP GET on vCenter was not available. VMware vCenter only supports SNMP traps for sending out alarms, which also makes perfect sense to me.’

If any has built any workarrounds to get this to work, please let me know.