Old Snapshots Alerting

You can add snapshot name (single value) into your alert message this way

1. When selecting variable to insert, check "Define SQL/SWQL Variable (Advanced)" option

2. Switch to SWQL radio button and use query

SELECT TOP 1 Name From Orion.VIM.Snapshots WHERE VirtualMachineID = ${N=SwisEntity;M=VirtualMachineID} ORDER BY DateCreated

which will give you the name of the oldest snapshot. You can modify the query to e.g. select the largest snapshot older than 30 days e.g.

jpaluch  wrote: Hello, I'm currently building an alert that would inform us about old snapshots on our virtual machines. The alert itself works fine but I would like to put as much information about the snapshot as possible. So far I have managed to set up an alert notification in the following way (I have cut out non relevant text): "There is a snapshot older than X days on ${N=SwisEntity;M=Name}. Oldest snapshot creation date: ${N=SwisEntity;M=OldestSnapshotDate} Snapshot storage size: ${N=SwisEntity;M=SnapshotStorageSize} Snapshot summary count: ${N=SwisEntity;M=SnapshotSummaryCount}" This is nothing special as it only includes variables available from "creator". What I would like to add is information about snapshot creator and snapshot description. As far as I know SolarWinds does not pull information from "Monitor" tab in VCenter so it may not be possible to do this currently (please correct me if I'm wrong). However I found in database that there is table named "[dbo].[VIM_Snapshots]" and column "Name" is basically snapshot description, so I'm looking for help how could I add this information into above alert.

out of curiosity are you trying to rebuild this report?

Are there differences in what fields you're attempting to report on?

Yes, I wanted to modify it in a way that it would list all snapshots for a given VM (not only total count) and add information about description and creator of snapshot for each of them.

I also wanted to add that information into our alert message and automate it in a way that alert would go directly to the creator of snapshot, but as I said SolarWinds is not polling creator information (or I was unable to find that in the database). I have only managed to add the description based on the first post in the discussion.

jpaluch  wrote: Yes, I wanted to modify it in a way that it would list all snapshots for a given VM (not only total count) and add information about description and creator of snapshot for each of them. I also wanted to add that information into our alert message and automate it in a way that alert would go directly to the creator of snapshot, but as I said SolarWinds is not polling creator information (or I was unable to find that in the database). I have only managed to add the description based on the first post in the discussion.

I see! The creator information is available through events, and we are working on adding support for VMware events WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON FOR VIRTUALIZATION MANAGER (UPDATED August, 2018) . This is definitely helpful detail. Would you say that the creator of the snapshot usually has an account in VMware that matches to what you've set up in Orion?

Its a vmware limitation really as they don't capture the creator as an attribute of snapshot but as an event. Not sure why. VMM would need to subscribe to these events to capture this info or poll (inefficient though) for them.

In our case we are using domain accounts for both SolarWinds and VMware administration, so yes they are the same accounts. However there will be cases when creator of the snapshot won't have a vcenter account but we would still like to inform him about outdated snapshots (I guess this won't be a problem once VMware events will be supported).

We are trying to create a report of snapshots for the last 14 days but we need the username who created the snapshot and description if possible.  Can we do that?

We are running the latest version released in June 2020

Thank you,

Ahmed