Unable to back up VMware VCSA; StatsMonitor not running

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So, after being at VMworld (Blogpost coming on this soon too!) I was working on our VSphere environment. I’m planing on new hardware with vSan, but for now we have to work with our existing storage. Storage, oh storage, always running low…

Anyway, I’ve been running vCenter appliance in a cluster configuration for a while now, but needing to free up storage I decided to destroy the cluster and rebuild it later on new hardware. Figured it would be a good thing to do a quick backup, right? VCSA makes it really easy to do, except it would fail, stating the statsmonitor service was not running. After ssh’ing into the appliance I verified indeed it was not running. Starting the service via:  service-control –start vmware-statsmonitor would fail with a whole bunch of script errors.

After checking with VMware the solution was due to start up timeouts for this service. The fix was to modify the service config to set it to a higher startup timeout.

sed -i '/StartTimeout/d' /etc/vmware/vmware-vmon/svcCfgfiles/statsmonitor.json
sed -i '/ApiHealthFile/a "StartTimeout": 600,' /etc/vmware/vmware-vmon/svcCfgfiles/statsmonitor.json
kill -HUP $(cat /var/run/vmon.pid)

Stop and start statsmonitor service explicitly:

/usr/lib/vmware-vmon/vmon-cli -k statsmonitor
/usr/lib/vmware-vmon/vmon-cli -i statsmonitor

Reboot VCSA

After that I was able to quickly run a backup of my vCenter. This was on a VCSA version 6.5.0.22000

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