Monitoring alarms and alerts

Introduction

To help cloud users understand and respond to their VM and application performance, Abiquo 3.8 introduces Alarms and Alerts. Alarms define threshold conditions in VM metrics and Alerts check alarms for activation and notify users by email when specified conditions are met in VM metrics. Users can create alarms in the virtual machine configuration, as well as at the virtual appliance level in the same screens that are used to manage alerts.

Which users can work with alarms and alerts?

There are four new privileges associated with alarms and alerts:

Manage alerts
Access alerts section
Manage alarms
Access alarms section in virtual machines

By default these privileges are only assigned to the cloud administrator role.

How do I create alarms and alerts?

Within your virtual appliance, you can create alarm conditions for metrics on different virtual machines and combine them to create an alert.

Before you begin:

Enable the virtual machine metrics that you would like to create alarms and alerts for. To do this, edit the virtual machine and select the monitoring tab. See VM monitoring and metrics

To configure an alarm for a virtual machine metric:

Edit the virtual machine and select the Alarms tab
Click the + add button to add a new alert

You can also create an alarm from the Control tab, using the + add button in the Alerts or Alarms panel.

To configure an alert that will notify you of the activation of an alarm group containing one or more alarms:

Open the virtual appliance and select the Control tab
1. Create an alert
  1. Assign alarms to the alert
  2. Enter the email address(es) to notify

Create an alarm

Field	Description
Name	Name of the alarm. The name can contain up to 128 characters. You can create more than one alarm with the same name, but only if the alarms are for different metrics. However, in Abiquo 3.8.0, you will need to be able to identify the alarms by name when creating an alert.
Description	Describe the alarm
Virtual machine	Virtual machine name, which by default is the virtual machine template name. Display only
Metric	Enable fetch metrics on the monitoring tab to retrieve metrics for evaluation of the alarm. When you enable the retrieval of metrics, Abiquo will retrieve all metrics, even if you do not select them for display on the monitoring tab. For your alarm, select one of the metrics available for the virtual machine. In Abiquo 3.8.1+, you do not need to display a metric to use it with an alarm, but it may be helpful to do so.
Period	Elapsed time during which the platform will evaluate the alarm based on the statistic and the threshold. The minimum value is 60 seconds
Evaluation periods	Number of periods during which the platform will evaluate the alarm.
Statistic	Statistic that the platform will use for evaluating the alarm: average maximum minimum sum count dev
Formula	Operator that the platform will use for evaluation of the alarm, for example, greater than. Values can be: notequal greaterthan greaterthanorequalto lessthan lessthanorequalto trendup trenddown
Threshold	Value that the platform will evaluate the alarm against, if appropriate

Create an alert

Field	Description
Name	Name of the alert. The name can contain up to 128 characters
Description	Describe the alert
Muted	Select this checkbox to disable notifications for this alert

On the Alarms tab, assign alarms to the alert. If all alarms are activated, the alert will notify the users registered on the Actions tab.

On the Actions tab, enter the email address(es) to notify if the alarms are activated.

Click Save.