Smarts Server Manager: What are EventCollectionFailure errors in ESM? How to troubleshoot EventCollectionFailure errors?

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:




EventCollectionFailure's come and go on our vCenters

Taken from the event detail it says--

Event Text: Triggered when the instrumentation encounters exceptions attempting to collect events. Ths is usually caused by a vcenter database problem.

Is this somthing we need to worry about, what does it mean?

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Cause

ESM uses "readPreviousEvents" via java API to collect event history. When this API fails the EventCollectionFailure event will be generated.

In looking at the logs there are multiple entries as below:

"VMEventHandler::handleEvent received exception when processing event Reconfigured "

When the polling succeeds during the next polling cycle the events should get cleared.

Resolution

VirtualCenter::EventCollectionFailure notification is generated when the account used by ESM is able to log into vCenter, but events are not collected due to API exceptions.

As the alerts are coming from vCenter if they are not clearing from Smarts, this means vCenter is not returning the historyevents properly in order for the events to be cleared.

Smarts is working as designed.  Please verify vCenter Settings and configuration.