Monday, August 6, 2018

Exclude filesystem partitions from alerts with vRealize Operations 6.7

With the release of vRealize Operation 6.7, one of the little less known feature around alerting capabilities is the exclusion of filesystem partitions from symptoms.

Imagine you have a fleet of Windows of Linux Virtual Machines where you want to monitor the file system usage of the various logical partitions created by the guest operating system. In most of the cases, you don't care about general purpose partitions such as /log or /tmp partitions. Traditionally, any monitoring solution which have the capability of monitoring file system would alert you on each of these file system partitions and would create something commonly termed as ALERT FATIGUE.

To avoid this alert fatigue vRealize Operations provides a feature which allows you to "EXCLUDE" the partitions which you don't care about easily while creating symptoms. You can then use this special alert on one, few or all of your virtual machines to ensure that you do not get alerted on filesystem partitions you don't care about and reduce the alert volume to actionable alerts.

Here is how you would create such a symptom:

1- Login to vRealize Operations 6.7 with a user account who has privileges to create symptom definitions.

2- Click on Alerts, expand Alert Settings and click on Symptom Definitions.

3- Click on the + symbol to add a new definition. 

4- Configure the symptom definition as described in the screenshot below:


5- Click Save


Once saved, you can use the newly created symptom definition in your file system monitoring alerts. Here is the link to vRealize Operations 6.7 guide which can help you with the steps, if you have not done this before...

This exclusion rule can be applied to multiple use cases, such as exclusion of CPU instances, snapshot instances or any other instanced metric type where instances are generated based on occurences in the given object dynamically.

Hope this helps.


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