Installation guide

You can set alarms to trigger when the state changes from green to yellow,
yellow to red, red to yellow, and yellow to green. Triggers are defined for the
default VMware alarms. You can change the trigger conditions (thresholds,
warning values, and alert values) for the default alarms.
Action
The operation that occurs in response to the trigger. For example, you can have
an email notification sent to one or more administrators when an alarm is
triggered. The default vCenter Server alarms are not preconfigured with
actions. You must manually set what action occurs when the triggering event,
condition, or state occurs.
NOTE Some alarms contain triggers that are not supported in the vSphere Client and cannot be changed.
However, you can still configure the alarm actions, enable or disable the alarm, and change the alarm name.
If your environment requires changes to these alarm triggers, create custom alarms by using the vSphere Client
or the VMware vSphere APIs.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Alarm Triggers,” on page 238
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“Alarm Actions,” on page 248
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“Alarm Reporting,” on page 253
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“Creating Alarms,” on page 253
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“Managing Alarms,” on page 257
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“Managing Alarm Actions,” on page 261
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“Managing Alarm Actions,” on page 261
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“Preconfigured VMware Alarms,” on page 264
Alarm Triggers
You configure alarm triggers to generate warnings and alerts when the specified criteria is met. Alarms have
two types of triggers: condition or state triggers, and event triggers.
Condition or State
Triggers
Monitor the current condition or state of virtual machines, hosts, and
datastores. This includes power states, connection states, and performance
metrics, such as CPU and disk usage. To set alarms on other objects in the
inventory, including datacenters, clusters, resource pools, and networking
objects, use event triggers.
NOTE You can set a condition or state alarm at the datacenter level that
monitors all virtual machines, hosts, or datastores in the datacenter.
Event Triggers
Monitors events that occur in response to operations occuring with any
managed object in the inventory, the vCenter Server system, or the license
server. For example, an event is recorded each time a virtual machine is cloned,
created, deleted, deployed, and migrated.
vSphere Basic System Administration
238 VMware, Inc.