Over the last few months I’ve done a bit of work around monitoring, Open vSwitch, and XenServer. This post lists some of the networking/Open vSwitch specific items to monitor on hypervisors.

  • Link StatusNagios SNMP Interfaces plugin works well for reporting a failed link as well as reporting error rates and inbound/outbound bandwidth.

  • Open vSwitch Manager and Controller Status: Transport Node Status is a quick and dirty python script which can be used with extended SNMP to alert when OVS loses a connection to a manager/controller. Beware of an influx of false alarms after upgrading Open vSwitch.

  • Open vSwitch Kernel Modules:  OVS KMOD (XenServer specific) is another quick bash script which can be used to monitor potential OVS kernel mismatch issues detailed in Upgrading Open vSwitch.

  • SDN Integration processes: Nagios SNMP process check. With XenServer, the ovs-xapi-sync process must be running for proper integration between SDN controllers and ofport/vif objects on the hypervisor.

Are there other network-specific things you monitor for hypervisors running OpenStack? Leave ’em in the comments.

Interested in Open vSwitch? Check the Open vSwitch category for a few more posts. Interested in Monitoring? Check Managing Nagios Configurations.