check_esxi_hardware 20250221 released: pywbem exception improvements

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on February 21st 2025 - Listed in Hardware Monitoring VMware Python Virtualization

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A new version of check_esxi_hardware, an open source monitoring plugin to monitor the hardware of VMware ESXi servers, is available.

Improve/Fix pywbem exceptions

The latest version (20250221) of check_esxi_hardware improves the handling of exceptions coming from the pywbem Python module.

The pywbem internal exceptions were renamed at the release of pywbem 1.0.0. Examples:

pywbem < 1.0.0	pywbem >= 1.0.0
pywbem.cim_operations	pywbem._cim_operations
pywbem.cim_http	pywbem._cim_http
pywbem.exceptions	pywbem._exceptions

You certainly noticed the added underscore (_) in the name.

Backward compatibility is important to me. To be able to support older (prior to 1.0.0) AND newer versions of pywbem, check_esxi_hardware now makes a version comparison of the installed and used pywbem version. This is done by using the Python module "packaging".

This means: Starting with this release (20250221), the packaging Python module must be installed to run check_esxi_hardware.

This can be done by using a predefined package from the OS:

$ sudo apt install python3-packaging

Or use pip system-wide:

$ sudo pip3 install packaging

Or inside your Python3 venv, use pip as well.

Catch HTTP Exception

While working on the improved pywbem exception handling, I also came across another exception, the plugin did not cover before: The HTTP exception!

This is useful when the plugin is mistakenly pointed to a HTTP endpoint which does not serve any CIM elements (ESXi HTTPS UI for example). The plugin will then show the HTTP exception and exit as UNKNOWN:

ck@mint ~ $ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_esxi_hardware.py -H myesxi -C 443 -U root -P secret
UNKNOWN: 400 (Bad Request)

In the past this would have shown a large Python stacktrace error.

Thanks and kudos

As always, this is an open source monitoring plugin and this often involves multiple people to get a new release out. Special thanks for this release go to Phil Randal and Claire Morgenthau for important and much appreciated coding hints.

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