VMware provides numerous tools to help administrators monitor their virtual environment to help identify potential and current issues. Alarms enable you to configure alerts and also specify the actions the system should take when they are triggered. In this guide, I will show you how to create Alarm rules in VMware vSphere. Here are some related guides: How to fix ESXI 6.7 ALARM: Seat disk exhaustion on 10, how to remove recent connections from the vSphere Client, How to upgrade VMware Tools in vSphere, how to Create a Snapshot on vSphere Web Client, and the Differences between vSphere and ESXi and vCenter.

vSphere includes a user-configurable events and alarms subsystem that tracks events happening throughout vSphere and stores the data in log files and the vCenter database. This enables you to specify the conditions under which alarms are triggered. Alarms can change state from mild warnings to more serious alerts as system conditions change and can trigger automated alarm actions. This functionality is useful when you want to be informed, or take immediate action, when certain events occur. Please see how to Perform Self-serve Password Reset using the “link for users who have forgotten their password”, and how to Add and Remove Multiple Virtual Desktops in Windows 10 | Multitasking.

Scenario: Monitor Guest Operating System Shutdown

To monitor your environment, you can create an alarm within the vSphere Client. You can create numerous alarm definitions in order to get notifications such as when exceeds a certain size etc.

Create Alarm rules in VMware vSphere

Go to Hosts, Clusters, and then to the Resource Pool depending on how your environment is structured. Locate the VM and right-click the VM and in the menu that opens, click Alarms as shown below.

Select New Alarm Definition

The New Alarm Definition wizard opens.

Specify Alarm Name and Targets

Enter the alarm name. E.g., Guest OS shutdown Alarm, or if you wish to monitor snapshot sizes etc, enter a unique or identifiable name such as “vSphere snapshot monitor”.

Enter a description (optional). Select the Virtual Machine target type. Click Next at each step of the wizard to continue.

In the Alarm Rule Window, Please specify the argument of your choice such as “Guest OS Shutdown”. Also, do not forget to specify the severity. Alarms have the following severity levels:

Normal – green
Warning – yellow
Alert – red

When you are done specifying the Alarm Rules, click on next to continue.

Alarm Rule 1. Set the rule as follows:
IF
Guest OS Shutdown | You can add an argument
THEN
Trigger the alarm and Show as Warning
Send email notifications: ON
Subject: You can use the default subject
Email to: enter your email address

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Reset Rule 1

You can configure the reset rule similarly as you have configured the alarm rule. The reset rule is responsible for sending a notification message when the warning or critical conditions are no longer met for an inventory. Please populate the following window as it applies to you and click on Next to continue.

A better scenario for you would be to trigger an Alarm if VM is starting.

Review. Review your rule configuration. If everything is correct, hit the Create button.

I hope you found this blog post helpful on how to create Alarm rules in VMware vSphere. Please let me know in the comment section if you have any questions.