
To test this you can create a custom datastore usage alarm and set the thresholds to be along the lines of Warning when Datastore Disk Usage exceeds 10% and an Alert at 15%. The datastore usage alarm will send notifications when a datastore has exceeded it’s configured thresholds. Working with and Analysing Datastore Alarms Once configuration is complete, click ok to save the custom alarm.


These thresholds can be adjusted to suit the needs of your environment, although it is good practice to begin taking action as your arrays approach 80% utilized. The default settings of the Datastore usage on disk alarm is to trigger a Warning when disk usage exceeds 75% and an Alert at 85%. This is where datastore alarms are extremely useful:ĭatastore usage on disk alarms can be used to monitor the percentage of disk space usewd on each datastore in your vSphere environment. These include virtual machine startup failure, vmotion failures, snapshot creation and commit failures and overall poor performance. There are a number of potential issues that can occur when a datastore is low on or out of space. The use of thin provisioning increases the possibility of oversubscribing storage at the datastore level. Datastores can run out of space due to a number of reasons, the most common ones being snapshots and thin provisioning. This article will look at how you can configure datastore alarms. You can use the PowerCLI cmdlet Get-AlarmDefinition to show all existing alarms in vCenter.If there’s one thing that’s apparent when supporting vSphere environments, its that it’s never good news when a datastore has ran out of space. For instance, if you configure an alarm at the vCenter level, then all objects in vCenter inherit that alarm, if applicable. If you configure an alarm high up in the vCenter hierarchy, lower levels also inherit that alarm.

In vSphere, there are three different aspects to an alarm: You can instead use PowerCLI for alarm retrieval and configuration. However, configuring additional alarms can be very time-consuming and burdensome if you do it through the vCenter GUI.

Fortunately, vCenter creates many alarms by default to keep you aware of anything that might need your attention. In a complex system such as vCenter, it might seem daunting to monitor services, ESXi hosts and hardware, in addition to all the other parts of the ecosystem. Good security requires proper and in-depth monitoring of IT infrastructure.
