PowerCLI: Getting vm alarms

A few weeks ago I started to put together a health check script for our vmware environments and the first thing I wanted to have in that report is a list of triggered alarms. To my surprise there was no native cmdlet to retrieve alarms using PowerCLI, instead I had to write a short script to retrieve alarms.

So here’s the the script for retrieving vm alarms:

$VMs = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine -Property Name,OverallStatus,TriggeredAlarmstate
$FaultyVMs = $VMs | Where-Object {$_.OverallStatus -ne "Green"}

$progress = 1
$report = @()
if ($FaultyVMs -ne $null) {
   foreach ($FaultyVM in $FaultyVMs) {
           foreach ($TriggeredAlarm in $FaultyVM.TriggeredAlarmstate) {
               Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering alarms" -Status "Working on $($FaultyVM.Name)" -PercentComplete ($progress/$FaultyVMs.count*100) -Id 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
               $alarmID = $TriggeredAlarm.Alarm.ToString()
               $object = New-Object PSObject
               Add-Member -InputObject $object NoteProperty VM $FaultyVM.Name
               Add-Member -InputObject $object NoteProperty TriggeredAlarms ("$(Get-AlarmDefinition -Id $alarmID)")
               $report += $object
           }
       $progress++
       }
   }
Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering VM alarms" -Status "All done" -Completed -Id 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

$report | Where-Object {$_.TriggeredAlarms -ne ""} 

This will provide an output like this:

But, as always, to make it easier for my colleagues to use I make a function out of it:

function Get-VMAlarms
{
$VMs = Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine -Property Name,OverallStatus,TriggeredAlarmstate
$FaultyVMs = $VMs | Where-Object {$_.OverallStatus -ne "Green"}

$progress = 1
$report = @()
if ($FaultyVMs -ne $null) {
   foreach ($FaultyVM in $FaultyVMs) {
           foreach ($TriggeredAlarm in $FaultyVM.TriggeredAlarmstate) {
               Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering alarms" -Status "Working on $($FaultyVM.Name)" -PercentComplete ($progress/$FaultyVMs.count*100) -Id 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
               $alarmID = $TriggeredAlarm.Alarm.ToString()
               $object = New-Object PSObject
               Add-Member -InputObject $object NoteProperty VM $FaultyVM.Name
               Add-Member -InputObject $object NoteProperty TriggeredAlarms ("$(Get-AlarmDefinition -Id $alarmID)")
               $report += $object
           }
       $progress++
       }
   }
Write-Progress -Activity "Gathering VM alarms" -Status "All done" -Completed -Id 1 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

$report | Where-Object {$_.TriggeredAlarms -ne ""}

<#
.Synopsis
 Lists all triggered VM alarms that haven't been acknowledged
.Description
 Outputs a list of VMs and the unacknowledged alarms they have triggered
.Example
 Get-VMAlarms
 Outputs a list of VMs and the unacknowledged alarms they have triggered
.Link
 http://cloud.kemta.net
#>
} 

Beside the fact that a function is easier to use, it also makes it easier to manipulate the data further. For example if you only want alarms for vm whose name start with “smart”: