Set Up and Configure vSphere Alarms | Blog

As you build out your cloud resources, you may begin to feel overwhelmed with the different elements that need your attention. Even if you have smaller environments, notifications are essential in case something is about to break or has already gone wrong.

VMware vSphere includes default alarms as well as the ability to add custom alarms that can notify admins for various events, conditions, or states. You can set up and configure alarms from the vSphere web client or native application.

Alarms can be set for:

• individual VMs
• specific groups by adding an alarm to a folder containing the desired objects
• an entire data center, cluster, or vCenter server with a “trickle down”. The full hierarchy for this trickle down is:
  vCenter > Data Center > Cluster > Host > Datastore > Folder > Resource Pool > Virtual Machine

Alarms can be activated when an event occurs, when a set of conditions happen, or when a certain state is reached by an object in your vSphere inventory (storage, VM, etc).

The default vSphere alarms are fairly comprehensive, but you'll have to set the alert action for each.

Events vs. Conditions vs. States

Condition and state alarm monitor types can be combined and are under the same selection when setting up a new alarm. A condition trigger is a number value that must exceed a threshold, like “CPU usage greater than XX Ghz”. A state trigger refers to a predefined element from a set of states that each object might have at any given time, like “connected” or “not connected”.

Specific events are a separate monitoring option when configuring alarm definitions and cannot be combined with conditions. They refer to events within the overall environment, like “VM created” or user “Role added”.