The sales vice president reports degraded performance in a virtual machine. To determine if the virtual machine has any alerts indicating the cause, review alerts for the virtual machine.

Alerts on an object can give you an insight into problems beyond the specific problem reported by the user.

Prerequisites

Locate the customer's virtual machine so that you can review related alerts. See Search for a Specific Object.

Procedure

  1. Click the Summary tab for the object generating alerts.
    The Summary tab displays active alerts for the object.
  2. Review the top alerts for Health, Risk, and Efficiency.
    Top alerts identify the primary contributors to the current state of the object. Do any of them appear to contribute to the slow response time? For example, any ballooning or swapping alerts indicate that you must add memory to the virtual machine. Are any alerts related to memory contention? Contention can be an indicator that you must add memory to the host.
  3. If the Summary tab does not include top problems that appear to explain the reported problem, click the Alerts tab.
    The Alerts tab displays all active alerts for the current object.
  4. Review the alerts for problems that are similar to or contribute to the reported problem.
    1. To view the active and canceled alerts, click Status: Active to clear the filter and display active and inactive alerts.
      The canceled alerts might provide information about the problem.
    2. So that you can locate alerts generated on or before the time when your customer reported the problem, click the Created On column to sort the alerts.
    3. To view alerts for the parent objects in the same list with the alert for the virtual machine, click View From, then select, for example, Host System under Parents.
      The system adds these object types to the list so that you can determine if alerts among the parent objects are contributing to the reported problem.
  5. If you locate an alert that appears to explain the reported problem, click the alert name in the alerts list.
  6. On the Alert > Symptoms tabs, review the triggered symptoms and recommendations to determine if the alert indicates the root cause of the reported problem.

What to do next

  • If the alert appears to indicate the source of the problem, follow the recommendations and verify the resolution with your customer.
  • If you cannot locate the cause of the reported problem among the alerts, begin more in-depth troubleshooting. See Use Troubleshooting to Investigate a Reported Problem.