View Events

You can view information for every event that occurred in your virtual infrastructure within the last 30 days. You can also view the events that are associated with specific tasks.

Viewing historical events can be helpful for troubleshooting your infrastructure.

Your view of historical events is based on your access rights. If you don't have access rights on some infrastructure elements or VMs, you can't see the events that are displayed for those infrastructure elements or VMs.

View general historical events

  • To retrieve information about events that occurred on a vCenter cloud account before the cloud account was added to Commander, see Retrieve historical events for vCenter.
  • To view events that occurred more than 30 days ago, perform an event search. For more information, see Search Cloud Data.
  • Although 30 days is the default length of time for which events are displayed, you can change this length of time through a Commander system property. Create a case through the Snow Support Portal for more information.

Access:

Views > Inventory > Infrastructure, Applications, or Storage

Available to:

All Access Rights Levels

  1. From the Inventory tree, select the level of your virtual infrastructure that you want to view the events for.

    If you want to view all of the events that occurred in your virtual infrastructure within the last 30 days, select the root element of the inventory tree.

  2. Click the Events tab.

    The recorded events are displayed. For each event, the following fields are displayed for events:

    • Type — The name or the type of event. For example, Policy Config for a change in policy configuration, and Task Started and Task Completed to indicate when a deployment has started and completed.
    • Severity — The severity of the log:
      • Info — A log was generated for informational purposes such as advising when someone has logged onto Commander, or to indicate when a task has started and successfully completed.
      • Warning — A policy action has taken place, or an error has occurred on your cloud account, that deserves attention.
      • Failed — A task failed, or some other event occurred that requires attention, such as a failure to connect to the host.
    • Time — The date and time when the event occurred.

      If the clocks for the servers that host your hypervisor and Commander aren't synchronized, the time of the event in Commander is stamped with the time when the event occurred in your hypervisor.

    • Username — The name of the role or system event that activated the log. For example, if a policy is triggered, the username is Policy. If a new user account is created, the username of the role that created it is displayed.
    • Description — Details about the event.

    If you select the root element on the tree, you can double-click events that occurred for VMs, to display the details of those VMs.

View events related to a task

You can view events related to a current or historical task.

Access:

Views > Inventory > Infrastructure, Applications, or Storage

Available to:

All Access Rights Levels

  1. Do one of the following:
    • For the Infrastructure view, select the root node.
    • For the Applications view, select the root node.
    • For the Storage view, select a VM.
  2. Select the Tasks tab at the top of the console.
  3. From the list of displayed tasks, right-click a task, and select View Events.

    A separate dialog appears and displays all events for the selected task.

    For some events listed, you can double-click to go to the relevant element (the task dialog stays open). For example, when you click Retrieve Historical Events, Commander displays details of the relevant cloud account on the Summary tab.

  4. Click OK.