Retrieve Historical Data for vCenter Cloud Accounts

You can retrieve information about events that occurred in vCenter before the cloud account was added to Commander. Retrieving historical information can take a considerable amount of time to complete, especially on large cloud accounts (for example, a cloud account that has thousands of VMs) because a large amount of data processing is occurring. In a typical environment of approximately 1,000 VMs, this task can take up to two hours to complete. However, the performance of Commander and the cloud account performance is not affected, because this activity runs in the background.

Historical information is based on two dates:

  • The first date (From) is the date furthest in the past for which historical event information is available for the cloud account. You can enter any date into this field, provided that this date is before the cloud account was added to Commander and that it is before any date for which you have already retrieved historical event information.
  • The second date (To) is generated by the system. This date indicates either the date the cloud account was added to Commander or the earliest date for which you last retrieved historical events for this cloud account.

To ensure that Commander reports contain information for all VMs, we recommend that the period for which you retrieve historical events is long enough for Commander to retrieve events for all VMs.

  • If you retrieve historical events, then purge your database and try to retrieve the historical events again, the task cannot be completed. Commander does not support retrieving historical events that have been purged.
  • When you retrieve historical events, the information about VM lineage and creation is not updated in real time. To see accurate information for historical events, sign out and sign back in to Commander.

Information about historical events can appear in the following reports:

If VMs are changed in vCenter while Commander is disconnected, the VM resource change is marked in the historical data retrieval process as occurring at the moment Commander reconnects. As a result, costs for those VM resource changes will not be accurately reflected in the Cloud Billing Report. The Cloud Billing Report will also exclude costs for VMs that are created then deleted in vCenter while Commander is disconnected.

Historical Events Retrieved

For VMs:For Hosts:For Resource Pools:

VM Power On

Host Added

Resource Pool Created

VM Power Off

Host Connected

Resource Pool Destroyed

VM Cloned

Host Removed

Resource Pool Moved

VM Connected

Host Disconnected

Resource Pool Reconfigured

VM Created

Resource Pool Violated

VM Deployed

VM Disconnected

VM Discovered

VM Migrated

VM Relocated

VM Registered

VM Removed

VM Suspended

For VM Custom Fields:

Custom Field Value Changed

Custom Field Definition Removed

Retrieve historical events for vCenter

Access:

Views > Inventory > Infrastructure or Applications

Available to:

Administrator Access Rights

Make sure that the clocks for the servers on which you're hosting a cloud account and Commander are synchronized so that all information for historical events is captured.

  1. From the Inventory tree, select a vCenter cloud account.
  2. Select Actions >Retrieve Historical Events.
  3. In the Retrieve Historical Events dialog, in the From field, enter any date (using ) before the To date.
  4. The To date is either the date that the cloud account was added to Commander or the earliest date for which you have already requested historical event information.

    For example, if you previously retrieved historical events for a date that went back three months before the cloud account was added to Commander, then the To date field displays that date.

  5. Click OK to confirm.