During my latest upgrade from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere v7 with one of my customers, I experienced a problem with VCSA backup prior to the upgrade. It failed with an error message that says “statsmonitor service not running”.
Trying to start the service manually with the following command failed too:
service-control --start statsmonitor
After a quick search I found following VMware KB55640 which helped me to resolve this issue. As in that KB stated, this issue occurs due to start up timeout for StatsMonitor Service, so I just modified the service configuration to have a higher startup timeout.
Workaround:
1. First off, take a snapshot of VCSA without memory.
2. Log into the VCSA Appliance Master Node as root via SSH or Console, pressing ALT+F1 in a Console to log in.
3. Modify statsmonitor service config for vMon to set higher startup timeout by running this command:
sed -i '/StartTimeout/d' /etc/vmware/vmware-vmon/svcCfgfiles/statsmonitor.json sed -i '/ApiHealthFile/a "StartTimeout": 600,' /etc/vmware/vmware-vmon/svcCfgfiles/statsmonitor.json
4. Stop and start statsmonitor service explicitly by running this command:
/usr/lib/vmware-vmon/vmon-cli -k statsmonitor /usr/lib/vmware-vmon/vmon-cli -i statsmonitor
5. Reboot the VCSA and check after 10-15 mins and the Statsmonitor Service should start up automatically.
After applying those changes we were able to backup VCSA.