new vCheck plugin: SRM RPO Violation Report (v0.2)

Updated: February 26, 2014.

Have you ever tried working with vCenter Site Recovery Manager’s built-in alarms? How about recovery point objective (RPO) violations? I have, and I quickly grew frustrated by the number of e-mails - essentially, false alarms - that I was receiving. When an RPO was exceeded - even by one minute - an alert would be triggered. While the alarms were technically valid, when you are protecting multiple VMs, and brief RPO violations occur frequently in SRM … well, you get the picture. Overwhelmed by these seemingly non-important alerts - "the boy who cried wolf" - they quickly became ignored. I needed a way to adjust, and fine-tune the RPO violation alerts so that I wouldn't miss something important.

Enter, Alan Renouf …

I found a great post on his site called Reporting on RPO violations from vSphere Replication. This was just the piece of vSphere PowerCLI code I needed. I decided to use this as a starting point and create a plugin for vCheck; which also happens to be found on Alan's web site.

With this new plugin, I’m able to redefine what constitutes a ‘serious’ RPO violation, and configure when alerts should be triggered. In addition, I can choose to generate regular RPO violation reports, even if they have already been resolved.

The plugin 108 SRM RPO Violations.ps1 has been published and can be found on the vCheck github under the Plugins directory.

The settings are mostly self-explanatory:

• $RPOviolationMins
  • Report on events that indicate an RPO exceeded by x minutes.
• $VMNameRegex
  • Only look for RPO events on VMs with these names (regex).
• $ActiveViolationsOnly
  • Report can display all RPO events based on above criteria, or only active unresolved ones.

Note, the RPO violation start time is based on the violations found within the configured event search criteria. For example, if you are only searching through four hours of events, then the ViolationStart will reflect a start time within that four hour window, even though the violation may have actually begun earlier. This is controlled with the $MaxSampleVIEvent variable in '00 Connection Plugin for vCenter.ps1'. Use at own risk.

Keep on virtualizing!