This post is based on our Hands-On Lab HOL-SDC-1610, which you can use for free at http://labs.hol.vmware.com

This shows you how to create a custom monitoring policy in vROps 6.

First, this is what my cluster looks like in the lab vCenter Web Client. In this scenario, we want to have a custom monitoring policy for all VMs in Cluster Site A because they are critical VMs and need a more aggressive monitoring policy. We want to change the memory % contention object to give us an alert at a lower percentage of contention.

We go into Custom Groups from inside vROps and click on the plus to add a new group

We name the group “VMs in Cluster A Prod”, pick a Group Type of “Function”, and for now pick the Default Policy. There are various group types – in this case we are separating the VMs based on function (Critical Prod).  We check the Keep group membership up to date box. This ensures that new VMs added to the cluster get picked up by the group.

We want to select VMs, so the Object Type is Virtual Machine. We want to select VMs based on the cluster that they’re on. In the vROps nav tree, VMs are descendants of a cluster. We set the object criteria to Relationship, Descendant of, and contains. We set the nav tree dropdown to “vSphere Hosts and Clusters”

The name box autofills as we type – Cluster Site A appears, we click on it to fill the box. We now have our custom group of all VMs inside Cluster Site A.

We now move into the Policy Library. The default policy is indicated with a priority of “D”. The concept of inheritance lets you have a master default policy, and you can then override a few specific settings based on group membership.

We’re going to create a new policy for Cluster A and base it on the Default policy.

We jump down to the Alert/Symptom Definitions.

To easily find  our symptom, we can pick vCenter Adapter>Virtual Machine from this dropdown, and then use “memory” on the filter box to find all VM-related memory Symptoms.

Here, I’ve changed the State to Local, and Override, then changed the threshold from 10 to 8. Any VMs bound to this policy will alert when the memory contention reaches 8% instead of the default of 10%.

The final step is to select our groups that will use the new policy. We check the box for our VMs in Cluster A Prod custom group.

Here is the Default policy with its subordinate policies. In Lab 1610, there is also another subordinate policy for a specific VM, linux-App-02a. This is an example of how granular you can get with your policies, getting down to overriding settings even for a specific VM.

We have a YouTube video on this topic as well: Customize Operational Policies in vRealize Operations Manager