Host Uptime Report

[zuldera7]

I received a request to send an uptime report to the server team of all VMware HOSTS. I thought "this will be easy, surely there is a host uptime report." Well, I was wrong. As a matter of fact, I can't find anywhere the MP is collecting host uptime. Does anyone know how to gather VMware host uptime with the MP? Did I miss something? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[sergey.g]

Hi,

Actually the answer depends on how you consider when host is up or down. ESX host in our Management Pack has a lot of monitors, some monitor that host is unavailable, another monitor that it cannot provide enough resources. I guess you can select overall Availability monitor - then you just need to use Veeam State Summary Report, here I took a screenshot of how it looks like and which settings I used:



Let me know if you need anything else.
Thanks.

[zuldera7]

By uptime, I mean how long the physical server has actually been up. 7 days, 2 day, 2 years, etc. Windows reports an "uptime" in the event long. I suspect that an esxi host is similar.

[sergey.g]

Hi,

I'm afraid we are not collecting this metric at the moment. Could you tell us more about your use case? Do you want a metric that will show how much time a host was up for the specified timerame (i.e. 99,998%) or the actual uptime metric? It's different because host could be restarted because of some planned maintenance, uptime counter will be reset in this case, but it doesn't mean that the host has bad "uptime" KPI. So uptime counter could be misleading in detecting how good was uptime KPI for a host and then anyway you have to summarize all values between the resets, but what about gaps in monitoring? So for me it looks difficult to calculate a correct uptime using the metric, but maybe more research is needed, please let me know your way of using the metric - I would really apprecaite it.

Monitor uptime in SCOM reporting on the other hand provides a precise estimation for how long a certain aspect of host availability was in downtime. I think if you select for example "Veeam VMware: Host connection and power state Alarm" in the report above it will tell you precicely for how long a host was unavailable from vCenter perspective, not ideal of course, but without a vCenter, host can simply run a VM, many virtualization services provided by a vcenter will be unavailable (such as vMotion, DRS, storageDRS, HA, etc.). As a key factor - monitoring of the host is going to be unavailable, so even if we collected uptime metric, we won't be able to grab it if vcenter doesn't "see" a host.

I would really appreciate more information about your use case.
Thanks.

[zuldera7]

Right, I understand, but this has nothing to do with "availability". The server team simply needs to see how long the server has been "up" according to the server itself. Has it been up for 6 months? Is it time for a reboot maybe, etc. The host provides this information.

I ended up using PowerCLI to connect to each host on a daily basis and enter the data inside SCOM.

However, I feel like this is something Veeam should collect. I am not saying there should be in "availability Monitor" for it, but it should be a collection rule.