Monitering snapshots

[sxnxr]

Hi

We get requests for snapshots all the time at all hours of the day. We currently use the vcenter scheduled tasks function to run the snapshots at a particular time. We set up a email alert that notifies a couple of ppl when it runs. The problem is we get a mail when that task starts the snapshot process not if the snapshot was taken successfully.

Is there a way to have vrops alert when a snapshot fails and look at the scheduled tasks for the name of the VM that the task started and if both VM names match send an email.

[bbambrick · Accepted solution]

I'd be careful of snapshots and vROPs right now. We run a reasonably sized environment but our backups are done via Netbackup snapshot backups. By default (6.1 and below) vROPs captures information about these snapshots, and stores them as objects. Every time a backup runs (every day) each VM gets snapped, backed up, and then the snap is removed. This has caused a massive bloating in the number of metrics in our cluster, making it extremely slow and unusable, as each snapshot is a unique snowflake...

The fix from VMware is to stop monitoring snapshots. I believe this has been rolled into the 6.2 default policies until they can figure out a more elegant solution.

Aside from that nugget, here's how I did something similar to what you're looking for:

• Setup a powercli script which connects to your vCenters once a day and looks for snapshot related failures in the event logs. If it finds an error, then tag the VM with a custom tag.
• In vROPs, setup a symptom for a VM having that custom tag, and setup an alert based off that symptom.
• You can now setup a custom notification for that alert

[vishalchand]

Are you able to share the script, I would like something similar for reporting purpose. Thanks in Advance