Nishant,

Configure Email Settings:

Homes - Administration - Email

Enter your Mail Server Name and Email Sender Address. Depening on your environment you might need to use username and password to connect to your mailserver.

Under VM Notifications you enter the Email recipients.

Now you have configured your email server settings and email recipients for Virtual Environment alarms. For most Fatal and Critical alarms you should now get an email alarm.

Rule Management:

Dashboards - Administration - Rules & Notifications - Rule Management

Under Cartridge you can select Virtual-VMware to narrow down number of rules to only VMware.

Here you can enable, disable and change thresholds for rules.

There are default rules that alarms you when you will run out of capcity for CPU, Mem, Storage.

If you click on a rule and select edit/view you will see that most rules have an email action on Fatal and Critical.

A wrote a blog about managing rules a while ago. It is using vFoglight 6.5.1, some things have changed in 6.6 but it will give you some more information: Working with vFoglight Alarms blogpost

I recommend you to go over all rules and enable and disable rules according to your own preferences. After that go into alarms dashboard and clear all alarms. That will clean up some old alarms and also fire an email if it occurs again.

Good luck!

/Mattias

Hi Nishant,

vFoglight has out-of-the-box rules to generate alerts for ESX Host CPU and Memory utilization and Datastore capacity. Here's the rules highlighted in the Rule Management dashboard:

Make sure that you have email enabled in the Management Server and that you are a member of the email group specified by the "VMAdmin" registry variable to receive these alerts by email.

Regards,

Brian Wheeldon

Hello Mattias and Bryan,

Thanks for the replies.  It was indeed informative to read your posts

In the current infrastructure there are ESX hosts which I don’t wish to receive alerts from.  This is handled by some other admins.

I checked the various rules available. All are interesting ones. The thing is I cannot use the default one comes with Vfogilight. If I am not wrong the default one will alert for all the ESX hosts in the infrastructure. Here I require a custom rule to be created according to the name standard of my ESX Servers.  Also the email recipient should be me for the new rule not anyone else. Is there any way to achieve this by copying the existing rule and modifying it upon my requirement?  

One more thing, disabling a rule is user profile basis (say my login) or it’s a global settings?? 

-Nishant

Hello Mattias and Bryan,

Thanks for the replies.  It was indeed informative to read your posts

In the current infrastructure there are ESX hosts which I don’t wish to receive alerts from.  This is handled by some other admins.

I checked the various rules available. All are interesting ones. The thing is I cannot use the default one comes with Vfogilight. If I am not wrong the default one will alert for all the ESX hosts in the infrastructure. Here I require a custom rule to be created according to the name standard of my ESX Servers.  Also the email recipient should be me for the new rule not anyone else. Is there any way to achieve this by copying the existing rule and modifying it upon my requirement?  

One more thing, disabling a rule is user profile basis (say my login) or it’s a global settings?? 

-Nishant

Hello Nishant,

You will need to copy the default rules and create custom rules.

After you have copied a rule, edit it. In order for the rule not to fire on all ESX hosts we need to set a filter (also called rule scope) to only fire if name contains something specific, ie a name pattern for example.

In my example I have copied VMW ESX Server CPU Utilization rule and now I`m going to modify it so it will only fire if ESX hostname contains the name ausesx.

Click on Rule Definition tab. To narrow down to specific set of ESX servers I´m modifying the rule scope.

Default rule scope:

VMWESXServerCPUs

Modified rule scope:

VMWESXServerCPUs where name like "%ausesx%"

You can click on the green checkbox to test the query to validate it only show the ESX servers you prefer.

To change email alarm receiver of this rule go into Conditions, Alarms & Actions tab and then to Action subtab, here you can change email alarm actions such as who is getting the email..

Enabling and Disabling rules are global and not tied to a user profile.

That should help you getting started.

/Mattias

Hello

Yes this is what I was looking for   So far so good. Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation.

I have one more important requirement which I couldn’t see in the rule list. I really required monitoring the data store utilization of the ESX.  From the rule list, I could only see the "VMDatastoreEstimated full time”. This is basically to track the estimated full time and more of prediction, which is really not helpful for my current environment. The disk usage varies a lot. 

So what I really required is to have an alert if the data store usage hits the threshold. Say 95 %.   I really need to achieve this goal in order to save the ESX from Crashes.

Could you please suggest any work around?

Look at vBundle: http://communities.quest.com/docs/DOC-4689

It´s a free add-on which contains many new views, reports and rules. We are currently evaluating many of the things in vBundle to add it to vFoglight in an upcoming release.

There are two rules for datastore utilization depending what you prefer, % Usage or GB Free. Please check the pdf on above link for details.

Rule Name                                    Comment:

vBundle Datastore Capacity           Alerts on Datastore % Full.

vBundle Datastore Storage Free     Alerts on Datastore GB Free

/Mattias

You are the champion

That was an excellent  information from you . I do appreciate a lot your help.

I am using Vfogilight 6.6 +VMWare Catridge 5.62. So I believe VBundle 1.90Build2 will enable the datastore monitoring in my environment. Also I believe there is no additional license cost involved in implementing this add-on.

So what do you suggest me? Should install the VBundle ? Or should I wait for the next release (If so please let me know when the next release will be available with Datastore monitoring)?

-Nishant

I suggest you install vBundle as it´s available today. I was just telling people on the forum that uses vBundle that it will be moved into the product eventially.

Good luck and thanks for the nice feedback!

/Mattias