6.5.1

Table Of Contents
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Actions - Denes operations that occur in response to triggered alarms. VMware provides sets of
predened actions that are specic to inventory object types.
Alarms have the following severity levels:
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Normal – green
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Warning – yellow
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Alert – red
Alarm denitions are associated with the object selected in the inventory. An alarm monitors the type of
inventory objects specied in its denition.
For example, you might want to monitor the CPU usage of all virtual machines in a specic host cluster. You
can select the cluster in the inventory, and add a virtual machine alarm to it. When enabled, that alarm
monitors all virtual machines running in the cluster and triggers when any one of them meets the criteria
dened in the alarm. To monitor a specic virtual machine in the cluster, but not others, select that virtual
machine in the inventory and add an alarm to it. To apply the same alarms to a group of objects, place those
objects in a folder and dene the alarm on the folder.
N You can enable, disable, and modify alarms only from the object in which the alarm is dened. For
example, if you dened an alarm in a cluster to monitor virtual machines, you can only enable, disable, or
modify that alarm through the cluster. You cannot change the alarm at the individual virtual machine level.
Alarm Actions
Alarm actions are operations that occur in response to the trigger. For example, you can have an email
notication sent to one or more administrators when an alarm is triggered.
N Default alarms are not precongured with actions. You must manually set what action occurs when
the triggering event, condition, or state occurs.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“View Events,” on page 105
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“View System Logs,” on page 105
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“Export Events Data,” on page 105
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“Streaming Events to a Remote Syslog Server,” on page 106
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“Retention of Events in the vCenter Server Database,” on page 108
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“View Triggered Alarms and Alarm Denitions,” on page 109
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“Live Refresh of Recent Tasks and Alarms,” on page 109
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“Set an Alarm,” on page 110
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Acknowledge Triggered Alarms,” on page 119
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“Reset Triggered Event Alarms,” on page 119
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“Precongured vSphere Alarms,” on page 120
vSphere Monitoring and Performance
104 VMware, Inc.