How do I get the vcenter name in alert emails

Question

Hey ya'll, I am using alerts triggered by VMware Triggered Alarm to find hardware issues on our VMware Hosts. I have the alert working but would LOVE to be able to insert the variable for the vcenter name into the email. 
 
 Unfortunately the only place I can find the vcenter name is in the Orion.VIM.VirtualDisks table. 
 
 Is there a way to Join enough tables so that I can get the vcenter name in the email alerts.

Rachel.Davidson · Accepted Answer

I got this from marcrobinson and it actually works!!! 
 
 ${N=SWQL;M=SELECT E0.Host.DataCenter.VCenter.displayname 
 FROM Cortex.Orion.Virtualization.TriggeredAlarmState E0 
 WHERE E0.relatedhost = ${N=SwisEntity;M=Host.HostID}}

I really appreciate all ya'lls help!!!

flackovic · Answer

I did some initial testing in my lab with a dummy alert I set up. Please add this to your e-mail message body: ${N=SWQL;M=SELECT VCenterName
FROM Orion.VIM.VirtualDisks
WHERE VirtualMachineID = ${N=SwisEntity;M=VirtualMachine.VirtualMachineID}} That should pull the VCenterName record from the Orion.VIM.VirtualDisks table you provided based off of the dynamic VirtualMachineID of the VM that triggered the alert. Please let me know if that works for you. If not, I'll gladly revisit.

donrobert5 · Answer

Done voting in.

adam.beedell · Answer

Hi Rachel, 
 Taking a quick look again in downtime ( cheryl1 it takes an age to populate the variables list, i'm sure there's something poorly optimized happening there) 
 These should work OOTB, but doesnt look like they do to me.: 
 ${N=SwisEntity;M=DataCenter.VCenter.Name} ${N=SwisEntity;M=DataCenter.VCenter.Description} 
 That said it's all about the object you pass in and it's relationship to the rest of the data. These OOTB macros look like they're for an entity one under a datacenter, so probably a cluster alarm. Might be that a small edit would resolve, say: ${N=SwisEntity;M=Cluster.DataCenter.VCenter.Name} ${N=SwisEntity;M=Cluster.DataCenter.VCenter.Description} or another rank for host maybe. Point being that I think the search through the macros bit might have stopped a bit early looking at the screenshots above, you'll find better options setting "show variables for" to the object you're working with and "group by" to category. 
 
 Anyway in the Custom SWQL path, worth noting that between Marc and your examples there may be a missed bit of context: 
 When me and Marc are talking about this bit ${N=SwisEntity;M=Host.HostID} that's a macro in a macro, where the point of that is to select the one relevant bit of information from the table containing the thing you care about. So often if you're building a custom SWQL or SQL macro you need to put an ID macro in for production, and test in SWQL studio using an actual ID (because the macro wont resolve there, having not got an object going in etc) 
 Somethng like this works in SWQL (which is the same as before, but i've added a case statement so it fails more gracefully: 
 
 SELECT TOP 1 CASE WHEN e0 . host . Cluster . DataCenter . VCenter . DisplayName IS NULL THEN 'No Vcenter Found' else e0 . host . Cluster . DataCenter . VCenter . DisplayName end as output FROM Cortex . Orion . Virtualization . TriggeredAlarmState AS E0 --where e0.Id = 14101159 Note the ID commented out for testing 
 
 Now to make that live i'd have to find some macro or two that produces a relevant ID: 
 That looks like a pain, no ID macro, annoying (possibly editing a macro as above resolves that) 
 Name and Timestamp might work though. Putting this together, this seems to work 
 
 ${N=SWQL;M=SELECT TOP 1 CASE WHEN e0.host.Cluster.DataCenter.VCenter.DisplayName IS NULL THEN 'No Vcenter Found' else e0.host.Cluster.DataCenter.VCenter.DisplayName end as output FROM Cortex.Orion.Virtualization.TriggeredAlarmState AS E0 where e0.DisplayName like '${N=SwisEntity;M=DisplayName}' order by e0.Timestamp desc} Note here i'm not matching the timestamp, which is probably not ideal, and maybe you'd get something weird in the event of quick flaps, but i'm sure someone can continue work on it if need be.

How do I get the vcenter name in alert emails

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