Events are recordings or logs, and are used for reactive troubleshooting, but may also be used to trigger alerts, which can be used for proactive actions.

Events Overview

Events are used throughout the NSX Advanced Load Balancer application to provide a history of relevant changes that have occurred. Events are permanent records. Alerts are configured to get triggered based on the occurrence of an event.

In the UI, events are viewed within the context of specific objects, such as a virtual service, a pool, or a server. In contrast, viewing events from the Operations menu provides an unfiltered view of all events across the system or the tenant. It also provides useful information for system debugging.

For a detailed list of events monitored by the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, see Events List.

Apart from logging significant incidents within the NSX Advanced Load Balancer, events are used to:

  • Trigger alerts for providing external notification.

    • Alerts are triggered within 0 to 5 seconds after an event occurs. However, if there is a high volume of events (5000+ events in 5 seconds), the alerts can delayed by 90-95 seconds.

  • Potentially scale application capacity.

  • Alter the NSX Advanced Load Balancer configuration.

For more information, see Alert Notif ications.

All Events

Navigate to Operations > Events > All Events to view all the events in the entire NSX Advanced Load Balancer system. The other Events pages in the system display only the events relevant to the context. For example, the Events page under a virtual service only shows events relevant to that virtual service.

The input fields of the Events page are detailed in Table 1.

Table 1. Table 1: Events Search

Field

Description

Search

The Search field allows you to filter the events using whole words contained within the individual events.

Refresh

Updates the events that are displayed for the selected time frame.

Number

Total number of entries displayed. The date/time range of those events appear below the Search field.

Clear Selected

If filters have been added to the Search field, the X icon on the right side of the search bar will remove those filters and clear selection. Each active search filter will also contain an X that can be clicked to remove a specific filter.

Histogram

The Histogram shows the number of events over a selected time per. The X-axis represents time, while the Y-axis shows the number of events that occurred during a period, represented as a bar.

Include Internal

By default, a number of events are not shown as they tend to be noisy and less relevant for general purpose. The NSX Advanced Load Balancer support can ask to enable this option to troubleshoot more obscure issues.

Include System Events

System generated configuration events are displayed by default. To exclude system generated configuration events, deselect the Include System Events check box.

The events that matched the input are displayed in the results. The information displayed for each event in the result is detailed in Table 2.

Table 2. Table 2: Events

Field

Description

Timestamp

Date and time the event occurred. Highlighting a section of the Histogram allows filtering of events within a smaller time window.

Event Type

This page is scoped to only show Configuration event types. Configuration events track changes to the NSX Advanced Load Balancer configuration. These changes can be made by an administrator (through the CLI, API, or GUI), or by automated policies.

Resource Name

Name of the object related to the event. For User_Login Events, this shows the username of the user that attempted to log in.

Event Code

A short event definition such as User_Login, Config_Create, Config_Modify, or Config_Delete.

User

The name of the user that has performed the activity for which the event has been generated.

Description

A complete event definition. For configuration events, the description includes name of the account user that made the change.

Expand/Contract

Clicking the + plus or - minus sign for an event log either expands that event log to display more detail or contracts that event log to display only summary information.

For configuration update events, expanding the event log highlights differences between the previous and updated configurations. The updates are color coded to indicate the type of update:

  • Green for new fields

  • Red for removed fields

  • Yellow for changed fields

Types of Events

Based on the source of occurrence or context, events can be classified as:

  • Controller Events

  • Config Audit Trail

  • Service Engine Events

  • Virtual Service Events

  • Security Events