Snapshot Usage Analysis

[Egg]

Hi,
I'm a bit of a newbie to SCOM (including the Veeam for VMWare MP) having taken over from someone else.
I created a snapshot of a VM yesterday morning and was surprised to find an alert this morning from Veeam VMware: Virtual Machine Snapshot Usage Analysis.
I had a look at the monitor properties below which are set to the default 48 hour Snapshot Age Threshold.

<Configuration>
<SnapshotAgeThreshold>168</SnapshotAgeThreshold>
<SnapshotSizeThreshold>2048</SnapshotSizeThreshold>
<FilterExpression>
<SimpleExpression>
<ValueExpression>
<XPathQuery Type="String">Property[@Name='entityId']</XPathQuery>
</ValueExpression>
<Operator>Equal</Operator>
<ValueExpression>
<Value Type="String">$Target/Property[Type="VeeamVEVMwareLib!Veeam.Virt.Extensions.VMware.VMGUEST"]/id$</Value>
</ValueExpression>
</SimpleExpression>
</FilterExpression>
</Configuration>

I thought it best if I extend the age threshold but it won't let me, even though it says 'You can view or edit the xml and it's associated schema by clicking the button below.'
I'm not sure whether it would recognise it even if I could as it didn't wait 48 hours. Am I missing something here?

[sergey.g]

Hello Julian,

Welcome to SCOM authoring In order to change configuration parameters for a monitor, you need to create an override. For the override you can specify new value for snapshot age threshold and you will have to specify a management pack where to save the override (they cannot be saved within sealed management packs). We would recommend creating a separate MP with overrides for our objects, I usually call such MP "Veeam Overrides". A separate MP will help you with reinstalling or removing sealed management packs.

With respect to this particular monitor. We are recommending to remove old snapshot because it's a well known VMware recommendation. If you have a snapshot for a very long time,this could produce issues with the VM size on the disk and performance penalties, as well as issues with snapshot consolidation. That's why we have 2 days as a threshold. But you are absolutely free to override this threshold if necessary.

Let me know if you have any other questions regarding this or any other monitors in SCOM.
Thanks.

[Egg]

Sergey,

Many thanks. I'm just getting used to this now.

I'm still not sure why, if there's a 2 day threshold, I got alerts the next morning.

Regards

Jules

[sergey.g]

Hi,

Do you mean you get alerts right after installing our MP? If so, then this is because our MP calculates a real age of those snapshots according to the time when they were created, so right after installing our managment pack it will discover all snapshots and if they are older than 2 days, it will immediately generate the corresponding alerts. If you create a snapshot after adding our MP, it will wait 2 days before firing an alert.

Thanks.

[Egg]

Hi Serge,

No, the MP has been installed for a while. Now I've created an override management pack, extended the theshold to 5 days (120 hrs) and saved it to the new MP. I thought this had fixed the problem as I tried a test snapshot and didn't get an alert. But today, prior to an upgrade, I just took snapshots of 6 VMs and just received an alert, but only from one of them!!! Bit bazar hey?

Regards

Jules

[sergey.g]

Hi Jules,

Could you check what was the text of the alert? This monitor besides age also tracks size of the snapshot, I think 2GB is the default threshold.

Thanks.

[Peren_4]

HI Everyone. Can you make it more easy so that i can understand it.