VMware: PowerCLI to report triggered Alarms

There's one more thing related to management that I've still not covered in previous blog posts about reporting: alarms.
They are extremely important indicators of issues occurring in our virtual infrastructure, they are triggered once there's something wrong, something that need to be resolved in order to make everything work smooth.

Alarms are of two kinds: Warnings and Alerts. A Warning indicates that something is wrong in our environment but it's not yet critical. When it becomes more serious a Warning is replaced by an Alert, dictating something needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

As usual PowerCLI allow us to retrieve and get some informations regarding triggered alarms.

The following PowerCLI script connects to a vCenter Server and retrieves all alarms from any registered host. These alarms are presented in an HTML table and, using JavaScript, we add a little bit a style. By being JavaScript interpreted at client level, browser need to have it enabled in order to work.

The following image depicts an example of what you get after running the script:

For the sake of keeping the script essential I've excluded the CSS from it but, if you have a look at my previous fancy HTML reports blog post, you will get an example about how to use it in your report.

Here's the code for creating reports based on triggered alarms, as usual, you can also find it in my GitHub repository: Alarm Reports.ps1

	#Variable declaration
	$vCenterIPorFQDN="10.0.1.210"
	$vCenterUsername="Administrator@vsphere.local"
	$vCenterPassword="vmware"
	$OutputFile="C:\Users\Paolo\Desktop\Report.html" #Where you want to place generated report
	Write-Host "Connecting to vCenter" -foregroundcolor "magenta"
	Connect-VIServer -Server $vCenterIPorFQDN -User $vCenterUsername -Password $vCenterPassword
	#A JavaScript to add some style to our report
	$htmlheader = @"
	<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
	`$(document).ready(function(){
	`$( "td:contains('yellow')" ).css('background-color', '#FDF099'); //If yellow alarm triggered set cell background color to yellow
	`$( "td:contains('yellow')" ).text('Warning'); //Replace text 'yellow' with 'Warning'
	`$( "td:contains('red')" ).css('background-color', '#FCC' ); //If yellow alarm triggered set cell background color to red
	`$( "td:contains('red')" ).text('Alert'); //Replace text 'red' with 'Alert'
	});
	</script>
	"@
	$hosts = Get-VMHost | Get-View #Retrieve all hosts from vCenter
	foreach ($esxihost in $hosts){ #For each Host
	foreach($triggered in $esxihost.TriggeredAlarmState){ #For each triggered alarm of each host
	$arrayline={} | Select HostName, AlarmType, AlarmInformations #Initialize line
	$alarmDefinition = Get-View -Id $triggered.Alarm #Get info on Alarm
	$arrayline.HostName = $esxihost.Name #Get host which has this alarm triggered
	$arrayline.AlarmType = $triggered.OverallStatus #Get if this is a Warning or an Alert
	$arrayline.AlarmInformations = $alarmDefinition.Info.Name #Get infos about alarm
	$HostList += $arrayline #Add line to array
	$HostList = @($HostList) #Post-Declare this is an array
	}
	}
	#Outputs the report as an HTML file
	ConvertTo-Html -Title "Test Title" -Head "<div id='title'>PowerCLI Alarms</div><div id='subtitle'>Report generated: $(Get-Date)</div>$htmlheader" -Body $($HostList |
	select HostName, AlarmType, AlarmInformations | ConvertTo-Html -Fragment) | Out-File $OutputFile

view raw Alarm Reports.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

That's all!!