How to monitor alarms in Host client? (no vCenter)

[PonF]

I normally monitor alarms in vCenter-Monitor-Issues.

But where to look in an environment without vCenter? I tried connecting with vSphere Client and with Web client but there are no tab for "Issues" here when I stand on top at Host. Only Performance/Hardware/Events/Tasks/Logs/Notifications. No obvious tab that is like Issues/alarms.

So where do you go to verify there are no alarms in the environment/host?

I use Vmware 6.0.

[IRIX201110141]

Alarms are a feature of vCenter and not available on the Host.

Go for vCenter if you would like to get Alarms.

Regards,
Joerg

[PonF]

Oh, okay... I thought you could at least see something. So that is not the case? There is no point of logging in to the hosts just to check if anything is wrong? (no snmp configured). I don't look for any specific alarm, I just thought we could check time to time the status, but if there is no status to check there is no point in doing so.

[Scott Vessey]

You can still manually check a lot of things that the vCenter Server alarms function will be checking for you - hardware status, host performance, VM performance - but it will all be very manual unless you get into scripts or 3rd-party products.

[PonF]

Hi,

Okay so if I have an host hardware alarm, like a disk failure or power supply failure, will there be an alarm showing? Either a "banner" or if you have to go into Hardware tab? The people doing this will not have any deeper knowledge about vmware, but I want them to log in sometimes to check for alarms that we miss with snmp, just like we do a weekly check in our other vCenter environment. Both environments are small.

But if nothing will show (without deeper investigation) either on start up page or in hardware tab there is no point in writing this instruction.

[Scott Vessey]

There are alarms for many things, but to answer your question specifically on host hardware:

Monitor Hardware Health Status

[PonF]

Okay thanks. This is a bit unclear since in vCenter you have a Monitor alarms tab for everything. If I go to Monitor in Host only, I guess I can choose Hardware tab and then "System sensors" or "Storage" and you would see an error there. But there is no "Alarms and warnings" as your link to docs vmware says. I guess I have to write "Check performance, Hardware, Events, Tasks, Logs, Notifications tabs for any warnings and errors" since it is so unclear where to check (compared to vCenter) and I can't do any test myself now in production (and definitely not all possible faults cases).

[Scott Vessey]

Day-to-day host monitoring (all the things you mention) is much easier with vCenter Server - plus it's centralised too.