Monitoring the health of your environment is a crucial step to maintain a good level or service and availability.
I’m sure all of you have realized the default alarms Vcenter generates for your hosts and clusters, but I’m not convinced all of you understand the power and capacity of the Virtual Center’s alarms.
VMWARE provides several triggers that you can customize to monitor several components of you environment, like, Hosts, Clusters, Networks, Datastores..
Also it can sends notification traps, e-mails and run commands. BTW running commands based on specific alerts is something amazing, you just need a little imagination.
For example, let’s suppose one of you hosts have lost half of it’s network capability, depending on the workload the guests running on this host could suffer from a network delay.
But if you have a custom alert based on this issue, it could run a PowerCli script to set your host to maintenance mode (which would v-motion the guests to another hosts) and send you and e-mail so you could take care of the issue.
Nice right ?!?!
Bellow is a cool video about a custom Datastore alarming, I’m sure it will open your mind for the VMWARE’s alarms