So today I want to share a really nice tool with you that you can use for monitoring your vSphere and vSan environments called Sexigraf. Not only does it sound sexy it is also really easy to setup and best of all it is free !
Sexigraf is an open source tool based on Grafana for visualisations and Graphite as the database engine behind the metrics. Of course there are many other alternatives for monitoring your environment. For instance VMware’s own vRealize Operations but those all cost money and Sexigraf does not. And let’s be honest who does not like a great tool that is free? I know I do.
As the Sexigraf website has all the guides you need to get started I will not take you to the whole process of how to deploy the tool. This blog is more like “look at this great tool” than a setup and installation guide. But I will give you a really short description on how easy the deployment is. This way you can already get an idea of how quickly you can be up and running with this tool.
All you need to do is download the OVA file and import it into you vCenter environment. Then you need to add your vCenter environment to the credential store and you are good to go. From now on the engine will start collecting data about your environment and will display it in beautiful graphs.
Here is an overview of all the panels availble in Sexigraf for monitoring your vSphere environment and vSan environment.
Which will result in some nice charts like these:
You can also monitor Windows and FreeNAS and soon they will also add C7000 blade chassis and S.M.A.R.T. monitoring to the tool.
So if you think this looks interesting I would higly recommend you visit the website of Sexigraf.
If you are interested in other vSphere related articles please have a look here
