VMware Aria Operations and VM Snapshots

As you know, VM Snapshots can consume space and cause performance issues in your vSphere environment. Because of that, we want to maintain proper VM Snapshot hygiene. We'd like to know which VMs have Snapshots, how big they are, how old they are, and more. Out of the box, Aria Operations provides visibility into several different VM Snapshots metrics and properties.

We can see things like Snapshot size, Creator, and Number of Days Old, among others. I'd also like to know the Number of Snapshots and the Number of Snapshots older than two days, but they aren't available. How can we get these? Super Metrics! Here, I've defined two Super Metrics:

I've shared these Super Metrics up on VMware {code}. We can now use them in Dashboards, Views, and Alert Definitions. There are several good VM Snapshot related Dashboards up on VMware {code}, but I've created one using the Super Metrics defined above, you can get it here!

You'll notice in the list of VMs, you can now see the number of Snaphots each VM has, as well as how many are older than two days old. You can adjust the threshold on that Super Metric to meet your needs.

Beyond Dashboards, we can also use these new Super Metrics to create Alert Definitions.

The Alert triggers once more than one Snapshot has been found on a VM. I've also bound Recommendation/Action to it, such that the end user can take action from the Alert itself in Aria Operations.

There is so much we can do with Dashbaords, Views, Super Metrics, and Alerts in Aria Operations. For more information, check out VMware Aria Applications and Cloud Management Tech Zone!