Creating Custom vCenter Alarms

By Simon Long – The SLOG; www.simonlong.co.uk

This morning I received an email linking me to a great document called; More fun with vSphere Alarms

It's written by a guy from VMware called Horst Mundt who is from Germany. Get it, Read it. It's really really useful. I've always wanted to be able to create my own custom alarm's in vCenter but I've never really fully had the capabilities to do it. Now with the release of vSphere 4.1 I can.

One of the key sentences in the document for me is the following;

You can define event triggers on any event that’s available in the vSphere API.

So any Event that appears in your Event's Tab can be set as an Alarm and that Alarm can be set to Email you, or Run a script etc.

An example used in the doc is creating an alarm to trigger whenever a custom field is edited on a certain virtual machine. It's not the most useful alarm I've seen, but it gives you a good idea of the possibilities available to you.

Other examples include:

• Creating an Alarm to notify you if HA has restarted VM due to a Host failure
• Warning alerts sent if a failover was unsuccessful

You can download the document here: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-12145