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:

Go to Infrastructure → Alarms and click the + add button
Enter the alarm details. For more details see the Alarm table below
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

Alarm table

Field	Description
Entity type	Select an entity with metrics from the list on the left. For infrastructure it can be a physical machine, VM, rack, or datacenter with custom metrics created using the API.
Entity name	The name of the entity
Entity label	The label of the entity, which for VMs only is shown in the list on the left
Name	Name of the alarm with up to 128 characters. Alarm names must be unique for each metric
Description	Description of the alarm. Used together with the alarm name and VM name to identify the alarm, for example, when creating an alert
Metric	The platform fetches all metrics, even if you do not display them. Select one of the metrics available for the VM
Metric unit	The unit of the metric. Read only
Metric description	The description of the metric. Read only
Dimension	When the metric has multiple dimensions, optionally select one or more dimensions. For example, if a VM has multiple hard disks, then the "disk read bytes" metric may have a dimension for each disk
Last datapoints in period	The number of datapoints that the platform will evaluate the metric during the elapsed time. The default value is All data points and the minimum value of the time period is 1 minute
Statistic	Statistic that the platform will use for evaluating the alarm, which can be: average, maximum, minimum, sum, count, dev
Formula	Operator that the platform will use for evaluation of the alarm, for example, greater than. Values can be: notequal, greaterthan, greaterthanorequalto, lessthan, lessthanorequalto, trendup, trenddown
Threshold	Value that the platform will evaluate the alarm against, if appropriate

Edit an alarm

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.

Delete an alarm

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.

Privileges: Access alarms section, Manage alarms, Manage alerts

To delete an alarm:

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

To remove an alarm from an alert:

Go to Control → Alerts → edit alert
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

If you delete a VM, the platform will delete any alarms associated with its metrics.

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