VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Alarms

A lot of VMware customers use vCenter alarms and notifications for monitoring their on-premises environment and the same goes for when they move to VMware Cloud on AWS. I was recently asked by a customer on how they can receive a notification when the VSAN storage capacity is getting close to 75% full. For those who are not aware we need 25% slack space for VSAN and will automatically add a host once storage utilisation reaches 25%, which is documented in the Service Level Agreement for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Creating an alarm can either be completed directly in the vCenter client or via the Cloud Gateway Appliance. Simply browse to the WorkloadDatastore, select Configure and then Alarm Definitions. From here you need to Add a new alarm:

Give the alarm a suitable Name and Description and click Next:

In the example, I am setting the alarm to be triggered if the utilization is less than 100% (Which will always be the case) to ensure that I receive a notification. Typically you would set this to is above 70% or whatever threshold you feel comfortable with. Once you have the correct parameters enter the email address to whom you would like the notification sent to and click Next:

Set the email notification if you want to be notified once the condition clears otherwise click Next:

Review your settings and click Next when ready:

Since our alarm was set to trigger if storage utilisation was less than 100% we can see that it triggered straight away within vCenter:

We also received an email notification:

Since currently there is no sender address there is a chance this might get picked up by your email spam filtering software so you might have to create a rule to allow it through. Due to this annoyance in the next article, I will show you how to trigger an alert from vRealize Log Intelligence Cloud.