Testing Alarms

[sjonesBTS]

I have several alarms setup on the DC level for my cluster. I'm curious how I can test the alarm action function to make sure it emails out properly. I have the SMTP setup, but didn't know if there was any easy way to test this without forcing. Is there a wayt to do this? Thanks!

[kopper27]

you know there are some thresholds by defaultto set an alarm for instance

Host CPU Usage by default 75% or Virtual Machine CPU Usage 75% as well.

just take for example Virtual Machine CPU Usage and set it to 50% eventually any of your VMs will cross that 50% and since the action it's to send an email you can test you SMTP configuration.

anything else just let me know

[cybulsk]

Similar to the previous post what I did was create a test alarm to email me when any vm was suspended, then I suspended a vm. Doing it this way I knew I had an easily triggered and repeatable event. When that email came through I knew I had set up my alerts properly.

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[kopper27 · Accepted solution]

something else I just found

if you don't want to set the alarm to trigger when is 50% (by modifying the alarm) if you have windows as VM

you can use this tool CPUHog that will stress the CPU to 100% and that will trigger the alarm and send you the email

http://www.microtask.ca/cpuhog.html