Change History of Monitoring Agent for VMware VI

• Resolved the issue of lagging in processing all events showed on vCenter by introducing 30 seconds of grace period for the agent to check the event history in each event collection cycle (APAR IJ28887).
• Enhanced with new timeout field KVM_VIRTUAL_MACHINE_IP_TIMEOUT in attribute group Virtual Machines to allow the agent to wait for the configured duration (in milliseconds) before returning the value of FQDN and subsequently all other attributes. The field KVM_VIRTUAL_MACHINE_IP_TIMEOUT can be configured in the environment variables. If this field is not configured or if this field is set to 0, the timeout functionality is disabled, and attribute group collection follows the default behavior. 
• Enhanced with orphan disk monitoring. RFE: Orphan disk monitoring on APM.

• In the event of connection failure, the agent would continuously attempt connection to data source without limit every 30 seconds.
  Such agent behavior remains even though user has removed the environment variable KVM_DATA_PROVIDER_CONNECTION_RETRY_COUNT or set it to 0.
  To have a limited number of connection attempts, the environment variable KVM_DATA_PROVIDER_CONNECTION_RETRY_COUNT must be set to a valid non-zero value.
  Agent will log an entry in the data provider log if agent is configured to run with default behavior, i.e KVM_DATA_PROVIDER_CONNECTION_RETRY_COUNT=0. Log message :#########There is no retry count configured, that means in case of connection failure agent will keep attempting connection with data source for indefinite time every after 30 seconds. To limit it you can set the environment variable KVM_DATA_PROVIDER_CONNECTION_RETRY_COUNT to desired threshold. For example, Setting it to 3 indicates agent will attempt to connect thrice;later entire data collection will get stopped and to resume monitoring manual agent restart is required.#######
• New attribute Snapshot_Age in group VM_Snapshots.
• Superseded Creation_Time attribute with Creation_Timestamp. Creation_Time  is deprecated as it has data type as string. To create the situation where timestamp based operation is required Creation_Timestamp metric is recommended for use.

• Added prerequisite checker support for Cent OS 7 and 8.

• Agent now supports fetching of the IP address or Host name of vCenter from vSphere API call, instead of showing Configured Address as it is from configuration panel. User can activate this feature by setting the flag in agent environment to Y. For example, KVM_RETRIEVE_HOSTNAME_FROM_API=Y.
• Retry count now can be given a limit to restrict the connection attempts with data source. For example, KVM_DATA_PROVIDER_CONNECTION_RETRY_COUNT=1000, adding this variable in agent environment file would put a lock on connection retry count in case of connection failure with vCenter. 1000 indicates agent would try till 1000 subsequent unsuccessful connection attempts and then would bring down the data provider process with a log message NO MORE ATTEMPTS OF CONNECTION;STOPPING THE DATA COLLECTION, TO RESUME MONITORING PLEASE RESTART THE AGENT. TO HAVE MORE ATTEMPT OF CONNECTIONS, RESET THE VALUE OF THE VARIABLE KVM_DATA_PROVIDER_CONNECTION_RETRY_COUNT. Default value to retry connection attempts is 6, user can set the desired threshold as per the requirement.
• Agent supports configuring of Instance specific heap size to efficiently utilize the allocated memory on the system. For example, KVM_CUSTOM_JVM_ARGS= -Xmx512m, by setting this variable in instance’s environment file would mean that instance is configured to use 512 MB of heap memory. The size can be changed based on the total count of vCenter objects an instance is monitoring.

• A new configuration field named KEY_STORE_PASSWORD is added. It allows user to configure the agent with new key-store password set for the agent JRE.

• RHEL 8 support.

V8.1.4.0.7

March 2019

08.19.03.00

• The VMware VI agent has been refreshed to ignore the unavailable(-1) values while displaying the trend of average on the graph for all multi-line charts.

V8.1.4.0.6

December 2018

08.18.12.00

• Component page enhanced to show the IP Address or Hostname of configured vCenter and its connectivity with the agent.

V8.1.4.0.5

September 2018

07.20.12.00

• Support for HostVFlashManager monitoring.
• ESX Server Dashboard shows the count of virtual machines in Critical, Warning and Normal status with respect to CPU utilization.

V8.1.4.0.4

July 2018

07.20.11.00

• General improvements.

V8.1.4.0.3

April 2018

07.20.10.00

• General improvements.

V8.1.4.0.1

December 2017

07.20.09.00

• Network Summary and Disk Count were added on the ESX Server overview page.
• Events group widget was added on Cluster summary page.

V8.1.4

August 2017

07.20.08.00

• The ESX Server group widget in the Server Summary dashboard was updated to show the SSH status.
• Agent decoupling feature was added to view and select the agent node and its subnodes in the same view. When the VMware Virtual Infrastructure component was selected in the Select Component window, the Component Editor displayed a tree structure of the agent node with all its subnodes.
  • If the tree was expanded and the agent node was selected, all subnodes were automatically selected. The subnodes that were to be monitored could be individually selected.
  • If an agent node was selected when the tree was collapsed, all subnodes were automatically excluded.
  • When the ESX Server component was selected in the Select Component window, along with subnodes, stand-alone ESX Servers were also displayed in the Component Editor.
  • With the subnodes, stand-alone ESX Servers could be selected for monitoring.
  • After the application was created, the APM UI dashboard displayed a tree structure of the agent instance as parent and its nodes as children.

V8.1.3.2

April 2017
(SaaS only)

07.20.07.00

• General improvements.

V8.1.3.1

September 2016
(SaaS only)

07.20.06.00

• With the addition of the agent decoupling feature, you can view and select the agent node and its subnodes in the same view.
• When you select the VMware Virtual Infrastructure component in the Select Component window, the Component Editor displays a tree structure of
  the agent node with all its subnodes.
• If you expand the tree and select the agent node, all subnodes are automatically selected. You can also expand the tree and individually select the subnodes that you want to monitor.
• If you select the agent node when the tree is collapsed, all subnodes are automatically excluded.
• When you select the ESX Server component in the Select Component window,along with subnodes, stand-alone ESX Servers are also displayed in the Component Editor. With the subnodes, you can select stand-alone ESX Servers for monitoring.
• After the application is created, the APM UI dashboard displays a tree structure of the agent instance as parent and its nodes as children.

V8.1.3

April 2016

07.20.05.00

The VMware VI agent dashboard is enhanced to include the following new features:

• The number of triggered alarms in the critical or warning state are also displayed on the Component page.
• A new table on the Cluster Summary page provides information about the proactive and failure alarms. You can click the triggered entity in the table and view the detail page of that triggered entity.
• A new table on the Cluster Detail page displays details of the ESX servers that belong to the selected cluster. You can click the ESX server and view the detail page of that ESX server.
• The Datastore table on the Cluster Detail page shows the over-commitment metric of the datastore.
• The Virtual Machines table on VM Detail page displays more performance metrics such as memory size, NICs, and disks. You can click these metrics and view their detail pages.
• New widgets and pages are added to display important performance metrics of the memory, disks, and network for the selected virtual machine.

• A new table on the ESX Server Detail page displays the network performance of the server network.
• The Datastore table on the VM Detail page and the ESX Server Detail page displays the latency metric of the datastore.
• A new table on the Datastore Detail page displays information about the virtual machine that is associated with the datastore. You can click the virtual machine in the table and view the Virtual Machine Detail page.
• The title of the % Memory (History) chart on the VM detail page was changed to Guest Memory(History).