Disable monitoring of specific VMs

[LTHPETER]

Hello!

I´m evaluating your management pack for VMWare, version 5.7.0.1054 with required overrides for SCOM2007 R2 5.7.0.1022.
I´m trying to figure out how to disable monitoring of specific virtual machines but cannot put it together. I´ve read KB1553, but it doesn´t match my reality. For example there is no discovery called “SV102LS”.

I found this thread:
http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10277
...which maybe is more relevant, however there are some things I don´t get:

1. There seem to be three classes named “VM”, the first one contains each monitored host, the second one contains objects named “VM0, VM1, VM2….” for each monitored host, and the third one is empty. (I´ve set VMsPerLargeScaleGroup=1).

2. Even if the second class mentioned above contains all monitored VMs, there is no way for me to distinguish them from each other because the objects do not have an attribute which represents the given name for the VM in vCenter.

3. I found another class, “VMGUEST Virtual Machine”, which contains all monitored and unmonitored guests in all clusters, but if I try to override discovery “nworks Stage 4 - Virtual Machine discovery” the class VM is suggested, not “VMGUEST..”.

4. I´ve also seen the thread http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14939 , but I guess I could create the group myself if I only knew which class to use.

So, how do I proceed? In practice I would like to create a dynamic group with all VMs names matching a wildcard and override a discovery for this group.

Sincerely
Peter

[sergey.g]

Hi Peter,

I'm afraid there is no simple way of doing this in nworks 5.7 out of the box. However I was able to create a simple management pack (attached) which adds VMs with name matching a specific wildcard to a special group (nworks VMGUEST Unmonitored Group). This MP also applies some necessary overrides and should completely disable monitoring of VMs which are in the group.

If you need to specify more complex rule for dinamically adding VMs to the unmonitored group, you can manually create a group in a new management pack, then export management pack and copy everything between <Expression></Expression> tags to the corresponding section in my MP.

If you just need to change the wildcard for VM name, open the MP and modify it inside the <Pattern></Pattern> tags.

I hope this can help you with your question.

Thanks.

[LTHPETER]

Hi!

I just posted a fairly long reply, but my browser seemed to decide that it should vanish, so I hope I´m not doubleposting.

The solution worked just like I wanted it too, and even without the need of running remove-disabledmonitoringobject :=)

However, I have some concerns:
Most important is how I should do if I would like to delegate monitoring regarding Guests if the uppermost object in the nWorks health model concerning Guests does not have a name that is recognized by administrators? For example there could be a group of admins that are responsible or interested in a specific guest or a group of guests (and there is another group of admins that are responsible for hosts). If I create a group based on the class VMGUEST Virtual Machine, which is the highest class I can find with a realworld name, will some monitoring regarding guests be missed because it happened above this class?

Also, say I have an environment with many many guests but I only want to monitor a few, I would still have to buy a license for each socket these few guests could potentially end up on, right? Or are guests monitored even if there is no license available for the host? Just so I know.

Regards!
/Peter

[sergey.g]

Hi Peter,

I'm not sure I fully understand how you want to delegate monitoring, but if you want to use groups of objects - in SCOM, to a group you can add any monitored object, it could be VM or ESX host or a datastore. Same is with dynamic members, I beleive you can specify a formula which will filter out objects of different classes.

With respec to your second question - yes, I'm afraid you need to have a valid license for all hosts on which a corresponding VM may reside.

Thanks