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:
- Offline VM Aging Costs Report
- Offline VM Aging Savings Report
- VM Inventory Report
- VM Population Trending Report
- Cloud Billing Report
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.
- From the Inventory tree, select a vCenter cloud account.
- Select Actions >Retrieve Historical Events.
- In the Retrieve Historical Events dialog, in the From field, enter any date (using ) before the To date.
- Click OK to confirm.
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.