Looking at the triggered symptoms for an object over time helps you to compare triggered symptoms, alerts, and events when you are troubleshooting problems with objects in your environment. The Timeline tab in VMware Aria Operations provides a visual chart on which to see triggered symptoms that you can use to investigate problems in your environment.

After you identify the following symptoms as possible indicators of the root cause of the reported performance problems on the sales-10-dk virtual machine, you compare them to each other over time. Look for unusual or common patterns.

  • Guest file system overall disk space use reaching critical limit.
  • Virtual machine disk space time remaining low.
  • Virtual machine CPU time remaining low.
  • Guest partition disk space use.
  • Virtual machine memory time remaining is low.

The following method of evaluating problems using the Timeline tab is provided as an example for using VMware Aria Operations and only one method. Your troubleshooting skills and your knowledge of the specifics of your environment determine which methods work for you.

Prerequisites

Review the triggered object symptoms. See Review the Triggered Symptoms When You Troubleshoot a Virtual Machine Problem.

Procedure

  1. Enter the name of the virtual machine in the Search text box on the main title bar.
    In this example, the virtual machine name is sales-10-dk.
  2. Click the Events tab and click the Timeline tab.
  3. On the Timeline toolbar, click Date Controls and select a time that is on or before the reference symptoms were triggered.
    The default time range is the last 6 hours. For a broader view of the virtual machine over time, configure a range that includes triggered symptoms and generated alerts.
  4. To view the point at which the symptoms were triggered and to identify which line represents which symptom, drag the timeline week, day, or hour section left and right across the page.
  5. Click Event Filters and select all the event types.
    Consider whether events correspond to triggered symptoms or generated alerts.
  6. In the Related Hierarchies list in the upper left pane, click vSphere Hosts and Clusters.
    The available ancestors and descendant objects depend on the selected hierarchy.
  7. To see if the host is experiencing a contributing problems, click View From and select Host System under Parent.
    Consider whether the host has symptoms, alerts, or events that provide you with more information about memory or disk space problems.

Results

Comparing virtual machine symptoms to host symptoms, and looking at the symptoms over time indicates the following trends:
  • The host resource use, host disk use, and host CPU use symptoms are triggered for about 10 minutes approximately every 4 hours.
  • The virtual machine guest-file system out-of-space symptom is triggered and canceled over time. Sometimes the symptom is active for an hour and canceled. Sometimes it is active for two hours. But no more than 30 minutes occur between cancellation and the next triggering of the symptom.

What to do next

Look at events in the context of the badges and alerts. See Identify Influential Events When You Troubleshoot a Virtual Machine Problem.