Alert for VM guests that reboot

Hey Cortney,

Have you looked at the "VMs rebooted" alert? It uses the search query of "vm.bootTime:[now-30minutes TO now]" and can be set to notify you accordingly.

I haven't confirmed that this alert is on VMan 4.x, in case you haven't upgraded yet. Even if you haven't, you could setup that alert yourself (just let me know and I can send you the details).

~Chris

I have seen that alert but it does not show any VMs triggering the alert (even though we have dozens of vm guests that restart on the weekend). I wondered if I was missing something.

Cortney

Nah, I see what you're saying. I rely on VMan more for performance than for alerting, so I hadn't paid attention to the rebooting alert. Looking back at my alert history, I see that it hasn't caught most of our reboots either. It seems to see some VM reboots, but nowhere near all of them, especially during a large set of reboots.

One might ask what your performance collection schedule interval is, but mine is set to every 5 minutes, which would definitely catch VMs with a vm.bootTime value of <30 minutes (if your perf check was >30 mins, it's possible that it could miss some reboots).

*light bulb* I think I just figured it out. Since VMan only sees what the vCenter API reveals, it will only flag that alert when a reboot is initiated in vSphere Client. Thus, if your guests reboot due to an OS- or user-initiated action, this will not be recorded in the vCenter event logs.

If you want to see up/down/reboots, Orion NPM is going to be your solution (in my opinion). Hope that helps.

~Chris

I created the following alert that  is triggered if a vm runtime and  the last boot are less than 30 minutes.

:Custom SQL ALERT(Advanced)

:Virtual Machine

Condition:

where (DateDiff(mi, Boottime, getdate()) < (30)) And  (Runtime  < (30))

here is a print

is this working fine?

I am planning to configure an alert for VM guests(Windows/Linux), without any wait time as the team wants to know if them guest had undergone a reboot.

With VMAN 8.4, this use case is very easy to solve. I've written up a quick example to demonstrate the ease of use.

DEAR VMAN: How do I have better visibility into VMs that are rebooting?