Alarm exceptions?

[varrus999]

How can I disable an alarm on a child object? It seems that if you create an alarm in a folder, all child object will inhert this alarm with no ability to override. This is quite frustrating. We have about 150 VMs that we are monitoring and I need to setup alarms if power state changes to off (because sometimes our backups which use snapshots actually crash the VM). If I create an alarm to monitor power state at the root of our infrastructure, VMs that are shutdown intentionally will trigger alarms on the specified interval. My only option seems to be leveraging resource groups, and moving VMs that are powered off long term out of their resource groups, but this creates an unwanted management headache. The other option is to create the alarm manually for every VM (150 alarms). Another headache. I just want to create the alarm once, at the root level, then disable/override it for the objects it shouldn't apply to. This would make sense with threshold alarms too. For example, disk space.

I can't be the only one with this scenario, so I hope there is a workaround...otherwise this is a huge (in my opinion) design flaw in the tool!

Thanks,

Mike

[Gostev]

What about setting those alarms on Business View groups?

[varrus999]

What exactly is Business view? I see the sheet for it at the bottom left, but when I click on this it brings up a window asking me for the Business View server. Is this a seperate component I need to install?

[Gostev]

Yes, it is an add-on component... check out video and documentation here:
http://www.veeam.com/vmware-business-view.html

Veeam Business View just got Bronze Award as 2009 Product of the Year by the way

[varrus999]

It seems we already have VEEAM business view in our environment, on another server. I'm trying to connect to it from VEEAM Monitor by putting in the server name and credentials, but am getting the error 'unable to connect to veeam business view web service, for non default installs please enter the url in the format http://server-name:port/<path>.

I tried certain variations
servername
http://servername:1340
http://servername:1340/#main

none of these works. When I open it locally on its own server the url shows up as: http://localhost:1340/#main

Any ideas? Do I need to update the version on that server? Someone else installed it, and it seems it has never been used. Is the integration with VM 4.5 something new?

Mike.

[Gostev]

Mike, sounds like you don't have the latest version. Current Veeam Business View release is 1.0.1, it was released together with Veeam Monitor 4.5 and implements additional functionality required for integrating Business View with other products.

[varrus999]

You were right. I installed the latest version and it now integrates with VM. Now what? I still don't see how I can easly group the vms I want to monitor / create exceptions, etc.

There has to be a way to put object in 'maintenance mode' and also disable or override alarms on child objects. This is poor design, can you please add this as an enhancement request.

How can I acheive this in Business View? What was your idea here?

Mike.

[Gostev]

Mike, my idea is to group all VMs you want to monitor into one single group with Business View, and setup alarm on this group in Veeam Monitor.

For example, in Veeam Business View you could create "VM Monitoring" category, and 2 groups: "Monitored" and "Unmonitored". Then, put all VMs you want to monitor in the "Monitored" group. Then, set the required alarms on this group with Veeam Monitor.

[varrus999]

It appears I need to use 'Rules' to populate the group....these rules need search criteria (begins with / ends with / contains / wildcard)...I have 150 VMs with different names.....this does not seem like an easy task - grouping VMs I want to monitor in one group. Is there a better way to do this?

[Gostev]

Use Rules based on the infrastructure location instead. You said above that you want to include/exclude objects based on their infrastructure location, so your categorization rules should be made the same I think.

BTW you can also populate your groups manually.

[varrus999]

Wow. This tool won an award?

[Gostev]

Yes, for more information please refer to the dedicated Business View subforum here. If you have some feedback or feature requests, there is an existing thread there (this way your feedback won't get lost).