Creating an alarm or email notification that triggers when VM Disk Latency or DAVG is high

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps to create an alarm to alert when the virtual machine disk latency or DAVG becomes higher than a specified threshold for a specified period of time.

Symptoms:

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 4.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.0.x

Resolution

To create an alarm that triggers when the virtual machine disk latency or DAVG surpasses a threshold for a defined amount of time:

Note: Select different virtual machines on different datastores to configure this alarm to monitor several datastores.

1. Click the virtual machine you want to monitor in vCenter Server.
2. Click the Alarms tab.
3. Click Definitions next to View.
4. Right-click the blank space and click New Alarm.
5. Ensure that the Alarm Type Monitor is set to Virtual Machine.
6. Ensure that the Monitor for specific conditions or state, for example, CPU usage, power state option is selected.
7. Click the Triggers tab.
8. Click Add.
9. Click the first Event field that gets added.
10. In the dropdown, select VM Max Total Disk Latency (ms).
11. Set the Warning and Alert to the millisecond value.
12. Set the Warning and Alert Condition Lengths to the time period for which you want that DAVG to be seen before the alarm triggers.

To get email notifications when the alarm triggers:

1. Click the Actions tab.
2. Click Add.
3. Under configuration, enter your destination email.
4. Click OK.
5. Click Administration > vCenter Server Settings > Mail.
6. Enter your SMTP information.

If the alarm trigger does not work or you are having issues, see Virtual Machine Total Disk Latency Alarm is not functioning on VMware vCenter Server 4.X (1025176).

Additional Information

Virtual Machine Total Disk Latency Alarm is not functioning on VMware vCenter Server 4.X