Infrastructure Alarms

An alarm activates when a metric passes a certain threshold. If you imagine a dashboard for your metrics, alarms are like red lights that light up when conditions change, for example, when there is a problem. 

If you would like the platform to notify you when an alarm activates, create an Alert for it in Control view. Alerts are a group of one or more alarms. They are like a worker monitoring a group of alarms; when all the lights for the group are lit up, the alert is activated. Alerts can also trigger action plans to perform automated actions when their alarms activate. After you create an alert, create an action plan in Control view with the alert as a trigger.

In Infrastructure view you can create alarms for custom metrics on infrastructure elements. You can also create alarms for built-in metrics for deployed VMs that you can access through the infrastructure path of their providers.

Screenshot: Infrastructure alarms

To create custom metrics for infrastructure elements, including datacenters, racks, physical machines, and VMs, use the API. To automatically fetch metrics for all VMs, after you configure and enable monitoring for the platform, in Configuration view, set the option to Enable virtual machine monitoring by default.

Create an alarm

To create an alarm:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Alarms and click the + add button
2. Enter the alarm details
   
   For more details see GUI Create alarm Infrastructure
   
   
3. Click Save

The platform will create the alarm for the metric. If you would like the platform to notify you when this alarm activates, create an alert for it in the Control view. You can create multiple alerts that include multiple alarms.

To create alarms for virtual appliances and virtual datacenters go to Virtual datacenters → Alarms. See Manage cloud alarms

When you edit an alarm, you cannot modify the metric or the entity.

When you edit an alarm, there is an extra field, "Active", that shows if the alarm is activated or not.

After you save the alarm, the platform will start to evaluate it again with new data when it receives the next set of metrics datapoints.

You can delete any alarm at any time, even if it is part of one or more alerts. The platform will not warn you that the alarm is used in an alert. However, you can check this in Control view. After you delete an alarm, you cannot recover it.

You can also remove an alarm from an alert.

To delete an alarm:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters or Infrastructure →  Alarms
2. Select the alarm and delete it by clicking on the trash bin delete button

To remove an alarm from an alert:

1. Go to Control → Alerts → edit alert

2. Select the alarm, click the trash bin delete button, and confirm
   The platform will remove it from this alert, but it will remain in all other alerts that it is associated with