Infrastructure alarms

You can display alarms in Infrastructure view on the Alarms tab.

Open

Alarms tab in Infrastructure view

To create custom metrics for infrastructure elements, including datacenters, racks, physical machines, and VMs, use the API. See Custom metrics resources

To automatically fetch metrics for all VMs:

1. Configure VM monitoring and metrics

2. Go to Configuration view → General

3. Set the option to Enable virtual machine monitoring by default.

Create an alarm

To create an alarm:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Alarms

2. Select a physical machine, rack, or datacenter with custom metrics, or a VM from the hierarchy

3. Click the + add button

4. Enter the alarm details

   1. The Name must be unique and it can be up to 128 characters

   2. The platform will use the Description with the alarm name and if appropriate the VM name to identify the alarm, for example, when creating an alert

   3. For the Metric select one of the available metrics. The platform fetches all metrics, even if you do not display them.

   4. Optionally, select one or more Dimensions if the metric has multiple dimensions. For example, if a VM has multiple hard disks, then the disk read bytes metric may have a dimension for each disk.

   5. For Last datapoints in period, the default value is All data points and the minimum value of the time period is 1 minute. However, it is not useful to evaluate metrics more often than the server is obtaining them. We recommend a value of 60 minutes.
      
      

      Open

      

      Create an alarm from Infrastructure view

5. 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.

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, called 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.

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

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

Related pages

• Custom metrics resources

• Use collectd plugin for custom metrics