Creating Extended Events

The EventManager.EventEx method allows you to create an event that contains an arbitrary dictionary of key-value pairs. This kind of custom event allows greater flexibility to store application data that is not associated with a managed entity, and is not limited to a single string value. The custom event structure also contains more sophisticated metadata than user log events.

The following steps show pseudocode examples of the operations you need to do in your client code.

Procedure

1. Obtain the managed object reference to the EventManager.

   si = connection.retrieveServiceContent(svc_ref);
   em = si.eventManager;

2. Choose a severity for the custom event.

   severity = EventEventSeverity.warning;

3. Create a local copy of an extended event with metadata.

   e = vim.event.EventEx(severity,
                         eventTypeId=”com.example.events.Total_System_Backup”,
                         createdTime = si.CurrentTime(),
                         chainId=0,
                         key=0,
                         userName=local_account_name);

4. Create a set of key-value pairs to store the information you want to associate with the event.

   arg_list = {};
   arg1 = vmodl.KeyAnyValue(key=”reason”, value=”Upcoming governance audit”);
   arg2 = vmodl.KeyAnyValue(key=”datacenter”, value=”Washington South”);
   arg3 = vmodl.KeyAnyValue(key=”organization”, value=”IT Cloud Services”);
   arg_list.append(arg1, arg2, arg3);

5. Add the set of key-value pairs to the event object.

   e.arguments = arg_list;

6. Use the Event Manager to post the event to the server.

   em.PostEvent(e);