One of my readers(Thanks Andrzej!) emailed me something that I thought might be interesting for those who are closely monitoring their environment.
Did you know that there are two similar VM event triggers in Alarms in vCenter?
- VM powered on
- DRS – VM powered on
The first only works for VMs outside of DRS enabled clusters. The second only works for VMs inside DRS enabled clusters. Now that’s definitely something you should be aware off when enabling Alarms / Event triggers. Imagine you want to know when a VM has been powered on and you enable the first even trigger but didn’t notice it will only sent an alarm when the VMs are not part of DRS cluster… You could be waiting for a very long time before you receive a single event alarm.
Just when I wanted to click “Publish” I received an email from one of my colleagues. Horst Mundt wrote an excellent article about Alarms and created a very handy spreadsheet which contains all alarms / events.
vSphere alarm triggers
In terms of alarms, vCenter 4 has much more to offer than vCenter 2.5. There is a whole range of default alarms available when you install vCenter 4, and they will give you a very good first shot for monitoring your vSphere environment. If you’ve never wondered what exactly the default alarms mean, or how to tune them – that’s fine. If you’re interested in a bit more detail – read the attached PDF.
- vSphere Alarms v2.xlsx (69.3 K)
- Fun with vSphere Alarms.pdf (656.6 K)
Make sure to visit the VMTN source page and leave a comment or rate the article.