Using Alarms

The vSphere alarm infrastructure supports automating actions and sending different types of notification in response to certain server conditions. Many
Alarms
exist by default on vCenter Server systems. You can also create alarms yourself. For example, an Alarm can send an alert email message when CPU usage on a specific virtual machine exceeds 99% for more than 30 minutes.
The alarm infrastructure integrates with other server components, such as events and performance counters.
The
AlarmManager
is the service interface for creating, setting, and managing alarms. You create an alarm, specifying trigger conditions and the action to take. When the conditions defined for the
Alarm
occur on the system, the
Action
specified for the alarm starts. The alarm also generates an
Event
that is posted to the
Event
history database. In addition, the action initiated by the
Alarm
might also post a second
Event
to the database, depending on the
Action
type.