As a virtual infrastructure administrator, you respond to customer complaints and alerts, and identify problems that occur on the objects in your environment. You use the information on the Symptoms tab to help determine whether the triggered symptoms indicate conditions that contribute to the reported or identified problem.

You must research a problem of poor performance on one of your virtual machines, as reported by one of your customers. When you view the Alerts tab for the virtual machine, the only alert that appears is named Virtual Machine is Violating Risk Profile 1 in vSphere Hardening Guide.

When you reviewed the Capacity tab for the virtual machine, you identified that problems were occurring with memory and disk space. Now, you focus your attention to the triggered symptoms on the virtual machine.

The following method of using the Symptoms tab to evaluate problems is provided as an example for using vRealize Operations , and is not definitive. Your troubleshooting skills and your knowledge of the particular aspects of your environment determine which methods work for you.

Procedure

  1. In the menu, click Dashboards, then click Troubleshoot a VM in the left pane.
  2. Search for a virtual machine to troubleshoot.
    In this example, the virtual machine name is named sales-10-dk.
  3. With the virtual machine selected, click the Alerts tab, and click the Symptoms tab.
  4. Review and evaluate the triggered symptoms.
    Option Evaluation Process
    Symptom Are any of the triggered symptoms related to the critical states you see for memory or disk space?
    Status Are the symptoms active or inactive? Even inactive symptoms can provide information about the past state of the object. To add any inactive symptoms, click Status: Active on the toolbar to remove the filter.
    Created On When did the symptoms trigger? How does the time of the triggered symptom compare with the other symptoms?
    Information Can you identify a correlation between the triggered symptoms and the state of the Time Remaining and Capacity Remaining badges?

Results

From your review, you determine that some of the triggered symptoms are associated with compliance alerts for the virtual machine as defined in the vSphere Hardening Guide. The violated symptoms triggered for the alert named vSphere Hardening Guide, which is one of several compliance risk profiles provided with vRealize Operations .

The following symptoms triggered in the compliance alert named Virtual Machine is Violating Risk Profile 1 in vSphere Hardening Guide:

  • Independent nonpersistent disks are being used
  • Autologon feature is enabled
  • Copy/paste operations are enabled
  • Users and processes without privileges can remove, connect and modify devices
  • Guests can receive host information

Other symptoms also triggered, which are related to memory and time remaining.

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

What to do next

Review the symptoms for the object on a timeline. See Compare Symptoms on a Timeline When You Troubleshoot a Virtual Machine Problem.

You can find the vSphere Hardening Guides at http://www.vmware.com/security/hardening-guides.html.