I had a customer reach out regarding VMs being deployed accidentally on local ESXi datastores or when a backup solution mounts a temporary datastore, the VM continues to run on it leaving it at risk.
Using Aria Operations 8.18.1, this was a multi-step process. We will create a Recommendation, Symptom & an Alert. An additional option after this is configuring the alert to be sent out as a notification.
Creating a ‘Recommendation’
From the Aria Operations homepage navigate to Operations >> Configurations >> ‘Recommendations’
Click ‘Add’
This is where you can type out a message to give specific instructions to recipients of the alert to give guidance on resolving. Once completed, click ‘Save’
When creating a ‘Recommendation’ you have the option to create a hyperlink to point to any external sites or internal systems, such as an ITSM link.
Creating a ‘System Definition’
From the Aria Operations homepage navigate to Operations >> Configurations >> ‘Symptom Definitions’
Click ‘Add’ under Metric/Property
For the first part, we will filter for a Property (see purple box) Select the Base Object Type as ‘Virtual Machine’ then Property and search for ‘datastore’ You should have a ‘Datastore(s)’ available. Click-Hold Property and drag it into the left side (see Green Box) to begin configuring with a name, you can then select a pre-populated datastore name or use a keyword such as ‘local’ or anything custom. Click ‘Save’ to completed this portion.
Creating an ‘Alert Definition’
From the Aria Operations homepage navigate to Operations >> Configurations >> ‘Alert Definition’ You can customize these options to reflect the severity of your symptom.
For the ‘Symptoms/Conditions’ section, we want to add the custom Symptom we created and drag-drop it to the left box.
On the next screen, you can add the recommendation we created earlier. Search for it on the right-side and drag-drop into the left and click Next.
Assign it to the desired policy, the following is the default policy, click ‘Create’
As a test, I migrated 3 VMs and found that alerts appeared.
I hope these instructions were helpful and can even be used as guidance for other symptoms you want to create or even modify out-the-box alerts and symptoms.
