Aria Operations or vRealize Operations (vROPS), allows you to selectively disable alerting on the objects it collects metrics from. In this blog, I will walk you through the procedure to disable alerting on a set of virtual machines.
TLDR: When creating a custom group in Aria Operations, you could assign a policy that disables alerting. It is important to keep in mind that the group membership is dynamically updated at 20-minute intervals.
If the TLDR didn't provide the information you needed, please continue reading the rest of this blog.
So, the first question will be, "Do you need to disable all alerts or just a specific set? " - The response to this will guide how to set up the vROPS Policy.
The next set of questions are, "Which VMs are involved? Are they a random collection or do they serve a specific function within the organization, or belong to a particular type (e.g., OS family)? " - The answers to these will determine the criteria for configuring a vROPS Custom Group.
By now you might have figured as much that you will need to create a VROPS policy to disable alerting and a Custom Group to gather the VMs on which you need the alerting disabled.
Let's take a look at actual process then.
There are two parts to selectively disabling alerts.
Create a vROPS Policy to disable alerts
Create a vROPS Custom Group for the VMs
Part-1 : Create a vROPS Policy to disable alerts
Below is a sample procedure to create a VROPS Policy soley to disable all or a set of alerts.
Logon to VROPS as admin or with a user account that has permissions to create policies.
Navigate to Configure | Policies and click on Policy Definition
On the Policy Definition page, click ADDÂ to bring up the Create New Policy page
On the Create New Policy page, supply a Name, Description and choose to inherit from your default policy policy and click on CREATE POLICY.
Tip: Although you inherit from your base policy, the settings you configure on the new policy will override the base settings.
You should now be in the create page of your new policy, with options to configure a range of aspects such as metrics & properties, capacity, maitnenace shedule etc. We are interested in "Alerts and Symptoms". So, click on Alerts and Symptoms.
On the Alerts and Symptoms page, set the object type first. In this case, since the aim is disable virtual machine alerts, we will be setting the Object Type to Virtual Machine.
With the Object Type set to Virtual Machine, you can further filter or locate alerts to disable using the search/filter box in the top-right-hand corner. For this exercise, let's filter for CPU related alerts.
Let's disable the two active CPU alerts. Ctrl-Click to multi-select both the alert definitions and click Actions | State | Deactivate to disable the alert defintions.
Once done, the state of the alert defintions should indicate "Deactivated". Click SAVE.
You should now be back at the create page for the policy. If there are no more changes to make, click X at the top right-hand corner to close the page.
At this point, you will see that the policy has been created but is not Active yet. This is because the policy has not associated with any groups or objects yet.
This completes the process of turning off the specified alerts. The next step is to set up a Custom Group for the Virtual Machines on which the alerts should be deactivated.
Part-2 : Create a vROPS Custom Group for the VMs
In the previous step, we created a policy to disable CPU alerts. In this section, we will look at the procedure to create a Custom VROPS group to include just the VMs we need to disable the alerts on.
Logon to VROPS as admin or with a user account that has permissions to create Custom Groups.
Navigate to Environment | Custom Groups and click ADD to create a new group.
On the Create Custom Group page, supply a name, optional description.
On the same page, you can set the desired Group Type. For this exercise, I have set it to Function.
The most critical step here is to select a policy from the list to apply to the group's of members. I've selected the policy "Disable Alerts - Core VMs" that we previously created. Once done Click Next to continue.
On the Define Membership Criteria tab, set the Object Type to Virtual Machine and for this exercise we are looking for Object names starting with 'core'. Since we have nothing to do in the Objects to Include/Exclude or Assign Custom Properties, click CREATE.
You might have to wait for about 20 minutes before the groups members are discovered by vROPS. The member count immediately after creation will be zero.
It will indicate the member count after a successful discovery.
Now that policy is associated with the custom group, it should show up as active under Policy Definition.
Once the policy is active, VROPS will not create deactivated alerts for any objects within the custom group.