How to Email a Custom Alert (Part 1)

By: Gary Monk

In vRealize Operations, you can access a series of pre-defined alerts that give you immediate insight into problems when they arise. Many companies also use custom alerts to meet their unique business processes. In this blog post, I will highlight how you can create your own alert definitions and create notifications for the custom alert, making it easy to generate an email for those specific notifications.

For the custom alert I’ll cover in today’s blog post, we’ll focus on a specific use case where a DBA wants to know when an Oracle tablespace exceeds 85% of its capacity. When this occurs, the DBA would like an email sent to her whenever it’s triggered so she can start to add space before it runs out completely.

In this case, we are not currently capturing the percent of usage on a tablespace, but have been capturing the total space in bytes and amount of free space in bytes. To compute the percent of space used, you will need to create a super metric within vRealize Operations.

Create a Symptom Definition

1. Navigate to Content, Symptom Definition
2. Select Metric/Property Symptom Definitions in the left panel
3. Click on the green plus sign to bring up the Add Symptom Definition window
4. Click on the arrow next to the adapter from the Base Object Type dropdown (in this case, the arrow next to the Oracle DB adapter)
5. Select the object type that this symptom relates to, in this case the Oracle DB Tablespace object
6. After you select the object the related metrics will appear below the base object:

7. Select the correct metric and drag it to the top of the right-hand panel
8. Select the type of threshold it is, static, dynamic or a compare threshold
9. Enter the name of the symptom definition
10. Select the level of the alert, info, warning, immediate or critical
11. Select the comparison operator, greater than, less than, etc.
12. Enter the number that metric will be compared to, similar to below:

13.  Click on save

Create an Alert Definition

1. Navigate to Content, Alert Definition
2. Click on the green plus sign to bring up the Alert Definition Workspace window
3. Enter the name of the alert and a description if desired
4. Click on the Base Object Type below
5. Just like steps four and five in creating a symptom definition, you will select the adapter and the object here
6. After selecting the object, you will select the Alert Impact tab below
7. In the Alert Impact tab, you will:  
   1. Select the what the alert will impact: health, risk or efficiency
   2. Select the criticality, in this case it will be based on the symptom
   3. Select the alert type and subtype
   4. Enter the number of wait and cancel cycles (in this example, I’m leaving them both at 1)
8. Select the “Add Symptom Definitions” tab
9. Leave the “Defined On” dropdown at Self, which is the default
10. Select “Metric / Property” in the symptom definition type dropdown
11. In the list of symptoms that appear under the symptom definition type, find the symptom that you created in the above step
12. Drag the symptom to the symptoms panel. You can drag multiple symptoms and select either all or any from the dropdown
13. Optionally, you can also add suggested recommendations as to what the DBA would do when the alert is triggered:

14.  Click on the save button

Now that we’ve walked through how to create a custom alert, first by defining a symptom and then by creating the actual alert. In the second blog post in this series, I’ll provide insight into how to email the custom alert that we created.