Alerts in VMware Aria Operations notify you when objects in your environment have a problem. This scenario illustrates one way that you can monitor and process alerts for the objects you are responsible for.
An alert is generated when one or more of the alert symptoms are triggered. Depending on how the alert is configured, the alert is generated when one symptom is triggered or when all the symptoms are triggered.
As the alerts are generated, you must process the alerts based on the negative effect they have on objects in your environment. To do the processing, you start with Health alerts, and process them based on criticality.
As a virtual infrastructure administrator, you review the alerts at least twice a day. As part of your evaluation process in this scenario, you encounter the following alerts:
- Virtual machine has unexpected high CPU workload.
- Host has a memory contention that a few virtual machines cause.
- Cluster has many virtual machines that have a memory contention because of memory compression, ballooning, or swapping.
Procedure
- From the left menu, click Troubleshoot and then click Alerts.
- Select Time in the Group By filter and the click the down arrow in the Created On column, so the most recent alerts are listed first .
- In All Filters, select
You have listed all the Warning alerts in order of when they fired, with the most recent alerts appearing first.
- Review the alerts by name, the object on which it was triggered, the object type, and the time at which the alert was generated.
For example, do you recognize any of the objects as objects that you are responsible for managing? Do you know that the fix that you will implement in the next hour will fix any of the alerts that are affecting the Health status of the object? Do you know that some of your alerts cannot be resolved currently because of resource constraints?
- To indicate to other administrators or engineers that you are taking ownership of the Virtual machine has unexpected high CPU workload alerts, click the selected alerts, click Actions on the menu bar, and click Take Ownership.
The Assigned to: field in Alert Details updates with your user name.
- To assign the ownership of the Virtual machine has unexpected high CPU workload alert to another user, click the alert, click Actions on the menu bar, and click Assign to.
- Enter the name of user to whom you want to assign the ownership of the alert and click Save.
The Assigned to: field in Alert Details updates with the name of the user you have assigned the alert to.
Note: You can remove the ownership assigned to a user by clicking the alert and selecting the
Release Ownership option from the
Actions menu.
- To take ownership and temporarily exclude the alert from affecting the state of the object, select the Host has memory contention caused by a few virtual machines alert in the list. Then click Actions on the menu bar and click Suspend.
- To suspend the alert for an hour, enter 60.
- Click OK.
The alert is suspended for 60 minutes and you are listed as the owner in the alert list. If it is not resolved in an hour, it returns to an active state.
- Select the row that contains the Cluster has many Virtual Machines that have memory contention due to memory compression, ballooning or swapping alert. Then click Actions on the menu bar and click Cancel Alert to remove the alert from the list.
This alert is a known problem that you cannot resolve until the new hardware arrives.
The alert is removed from the alert list, but this action does not resolve the underlying condition. The symptoms in this alert are based on metrics, so the alert will be generated during the next collection and analysis cycle. This pattern continues until you resolve the underlying hardware and workload distribution issues.
Results
You processed the critical health alerts and took ownership of the ones to resolve or troubleshoot further.
