Monitoring and reporting for Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V in a single System Center Operations Manager Console
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Christopher Keyaert
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How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Christopher Keyaert »

Hello All,

In our VM environment, we've got production, acceptance and dev. servers and I would like to disable the monitoring for the dev machine.
Our dev servers are not on a particular esx, so I couldn't exclude the complete esx in the nworks web interface.

What can I do for excluding one or more servers from the monitoring ?

My idea is to put the VM in a particular group, and apply overrides on that group. But must I manually override each monitor for disabling it for the new group ?
Is there another way to do that ?

Thank you
Regards
Christopher
Irina Simkina
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Irina Simkina »

Hello Christopher,

Because of the VM discovery rule targets the VMs Folder, and not the actual VMs, it's not possible to disable discovery for the particular VM or group of VMs.
So yes, you need to manually override each monitor for disabling it for VM and VM child objects.

SCOM also supports maintaince mode for particular objects or groups to disable all kinds of notifications and alerting, but it has a limited schedule and may be not applicable for you case.

With best regards,
Irina
Christopher Keyaert
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Christopher Keyaert »

As you said that the VM Discovery rule targets the VMs Folder, is it possible to exclude a specify VMFolder of this discovery ?
Irina Simkina
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Irina Simkina »

Hi Christopher,
VMs Folder is only the container for all VMs within the host. But we cannot exclude any specific VC VMFolders from the discovery.

Irina
Mike
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Mike »

Is this an idea to "solve" in a future release?!?
We have the exact same construction as Christopher and don't want to see any errors in our Test and Development domains.

VMWare is ideal to have these mixed on the same ESX servers, that why you have resource pools.
I hope Veeam will think about this, because overrides isn't the way to go here, please try to solve this.

I know Veeam as a provider of complete and intuitive products, this just doesn't fit....
Irina Simkina
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Irina Simkina »

Hi,
there is the workaround if you use VM folders in the VC.
1. Open Authoring tab, select Object Discoveries and find “SV100 first stage discovery“ and “SV102 third stage discovery“ (any rule).
For both “SV100 first stage discovery“ and “SV102 third stage discovery“ create an override “For all objects of class: nworks Collector” (or “For all objects of class: VM”);
set “EnableVmFolder” = true, save it in nworks override MP (please don’t use Default Management Pack)
2. Open nworks Enterprise Manager, run Rebuild Full topology or restart collector
3. Wait while VM Folders appears in _Datacenter topology in SCOM
4. Create new group in Authoring to disable monitors. Add as explicit member VMFolder with VMs you want to exclude from monitoring.
5. Choose monitor you want to disable and select “Disable… ” for group you just created.

Should work.

Irina
vBPav
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by vBPav »

As Irina describes, you can not stop the "discovery" of a specific or grouping of VMs. However, you can change the behavior of Monitors for those VMs.

1.) Disable all VMGuest (vCPU, vRAM, vDisk, vNIC) monitors for a group of VMs.
2.) Change the Alert Priority of all VMGuest (vCPU, vRAM, vDISK, vNIC) monitors for a group of VMs to "low"
2a.) Create a notification subscription that captures alerts with Alert Priority of "high"
2b.) Create views that captures alerts with Alert Priority of "high"
2c.) Create Framework Connectors that captures alerts with Alert Priority of "high"

Option 2 is nice, because you still have the capability of going into SCOM and checking out how those dev/stage/test environments are doing without necessarily notifying on them. Check out the Microsoft Generic Report, "Alerts". You can run this report against those dev/stage/test vms on a daily, weekly, monthly basis so you can get a quick at-a-glance snapshot on how those VMs are doing without receiving e-mails or tickets at 2am in the morning.

Just my 2 cents!

Brian Pavnick - Solutions Architect
Brian Pavnick | Cireson| Solutions Architect

- Follow me on Twitter @ vbpav
- Reach me on e-mail @ brian.pavnick@cireson.com
Christopher Keyaert
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Christopher Keyaert »

Hello Brian, Irina,

Now, one year later, is there a better way to achieve that ?
I'm still working with the 5.5 release, so there is something new in the 5.6 ?

Thank you
Regards

Christopher
Irina Simkina
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Irina Simkina »

Hi Christopher,

sorry to say that, but we don't have improvements for this point in the latest release.
We still have plans for the segmented monitoring but it needs more time for Dev and QA then previously expected.
So for now the only workaround is to group Test and Prod VMs and disable\override monitors for groups.

With best regards,
Irina
Christopher Keyaert
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Christopher Keyaert »

ok, thank you for the answer ;)
Alec King
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Alec King »

Hi Christopher!
The free Veeam utility Business View can help you do this :)
With Business View (BV), you can set custom attributes on VMs (or Hosts) in vCenter. You can build rules in BV on how the attributes are set - one rule could be "set this attribute for all VMs in this Resource Pool".
And the nworks MP will recognise certain attributes and bring them into SCOM as properties of the VM.
Then you can use these attributes to populate a Group in SCOM, such as "VM Dev servers".
Then create the overrides to disable nworks Monitors for that group.
The group will be automatically maintained, because when you add a VM to the Resource Pool (or Folder) in vCenter, BV will set the attribute, and so the VM will automatically join the SCOM group.

There is an Appendix in our MP Operations Guide on how to set up BV - MP integration.

You can download Business View from veeam.com, at no charge! :D
Hope that helps - any questions let us know!

Cheers,
Alec
reddrinker
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by reddrinker »

Hi,

Someway to exclude a folder or dynamic group of vm's would be very handy especially when using with a VDI environment as machine's are being created and destroyed quite often and the snapshot age alert for VDI guests is a bit of a nuisance.

Anyone have any advice on this example.

Cheers

Jason
vBPav
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by vBPav »

Hello Christopher,

With regards to the "snapshotAge" monitor, you can modify the behavior of this monitor (and any other monitor) based on many factors:

resource pool
vm naming scheme
vm special attribute
ESX Cluster
ESX Host

So, if I were to setup a VMware View Desktop Pool I must provide either an ESX Host or Cluster as well as a Resource Pool the VMs will reside in. If the ESX Host or Cluster is 100% dedicated to VDI, I then can completely disable discovery of the VMs based on VMs Folder per each ESX Host. However, if this is not the case I can then use Monitor Overrides that target the Resource Pool that my VDI VMs live in (overrides targeting groups). At this point I can modify the behavior of the VM monitors in many different ways:

- I can disable the entire Monitor
- I can make the monitors stop sending Alerts (and thus, no notifications)
- I can change the alert Priority (low, medium, high). Perhaps High Priority alerts are sent via e-mail 24/7, Medium are sent via e-mail during Business Hours, and Low are NOT sent via e-mail. I can then setup an "Alert" report to send a weekly or monthly roll-up of all "Low" alerts.
- I can change the NumSamples of a performance Monitor to minimize frequency of alerts
- I can change the threshold of performance monitors to be less aggressive in generating alerts

My recommendation would be to modify the behavior of the monitors under the VMGuest, vCPU, vRAM, vNIC, and vDISK classes.

Hope this helps!


Brian Pavnick - Solutions Architect
Brian Pavnick | Cireson| Solutions Architect

- Follow me on Twitter @ vbpav
- Reach me on e-mail @ brian.pavnick@cireson.com
Alexey.Strygin
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Alexey.Strygin »

Hello Christopher,

There is another way you can go:

Create a group in vCenter and place all the VMs you don't want to monitor.
Go to permissions and change the permission to "no access" for the account that collector uses to connect to vCenter.
Login to Enterprise Manager and click "Rebuild Full Topology" to trigger rediscovery.

You won't see these VMs anymore.

Cheers,
Alexey Strygin
Alec King
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Re: How to disable the monitoring for a group of VM

Post by Alec King »

Hi All,

Just wanted to point out - that we do NOT support setting 'No Access' permissions within vCenter.
You cannot exclude any objects (Hosts, VMs etc) from monitoring by setting No Access for the nworks connection account. This can cause errors and instability when nworks Collector tries to build the vCenter topology.

nworks Collector must have (minimum) read-only permissions for the entire VI. The Read-Only role must be set at the root of the vCenter tree (on vCenter node itself)

If you do want to exclude some Cluster(s) or Host(s) from montioring - they should be unchecked in the nworks UI.
To modify monitoring thresholds, down to the VM level - use Groups in Ops Mgr and set overrides.

Cheers,
Alec
Alec King
Vice President, Product Management
Veeam Software
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