Disconnected Hosts in vCenter are not triggering an alert in Aria Operations

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Custom alerts designed to trigger on host disconnects do not trigger an alert.

Environment

VMware Aria Operations 8.x

Cause

This issue is caused by incorrect syntax in the Symptom.  Alternatively, the alert being assigned to a policy that is not assigned to the host(s).

Resolution

1. Under Operations, Configurations, Alert definitions, edit your custom alert.
2. Under Symptoms/ Conditions, search for the OOTB symptom of "Host disconnected from vCenter" instead of "Host is Disconnected State".  The syntax include "Connection State != connected" instead of "Connection State = disconnected".  Example:
3. Next under Policies, confirm that the custom alert is connected to the proper policy for the affected host(s).

 

Additional Information

A couple other possible reasons a similar alert of "Host has lost connection to vCenter Server" may not fire is:

• For the alert definition "Host has lost connection to vCenter Server", it is defined to trigger if ALL the following symptoms are TRUE
  • The host metric > Runtime|Power State is set to "Standby" AND
  • The host metric > Runtime|Connection State does not equal "connected"

 

Both the above statements must be true for the alert to trigger

• In one particular instance, Runtime|Power State was set to "unknown" so the alert was not generated until a Host reboot
• For the alert definition "vSphere High Availability (HA) has detected a possible host failure", is relying on the collection of the fault event by that name to be present in vCenter. If there is an issue where this fault event is not present on the vCenter side, Aria Operations would not trigger this symptom or alert.