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Quick Tip - How to monitor when ESXi filesystem and partitions are filling up?

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Here is another tidbit on how you can leverage the power of vSphere Events, which now includes over 2K+ as of vSphere 8.0 Update 1 to help monitor when an ESXi filesystem and/or partition is low on disk space.

With vSphere 6.7 or later, we have two events that you can use to help alert when either an ESXi ramdisk (e.g. /var) or VFAT partition (e.g. bootbanks) has filled up.

  • Ramdisk: esx.problem.visorfs.ramdisk.full
  • VFAT: esx.problem.vfat.filesystem.full.other

When either of these occur, you can easily find them under the Monitor->Events section for an ESXi host as shown in the screenshot below.

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How to modernize your vSphere Alarm actions using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)?

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The VMware Event Broker Application/Appliance (VEBA) solution makes it extremely easy for customers to build Event-Driven Automation that can react to over 1800+ vSphere-based Events using your favorite scripting or programming language of choice that includes PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python and Go to just name a few.

The benefits of VEBA can extend beyond just vSphere Events and can also be used with both new and existing vSphere Alarms. In fact, vSphere Alarms is just another a type of vSphere Event, which then makes it super easy to work with if you are already familiar with VEBA. Similar to the "triggers" that are supported with vSphere Events, the available options for extensibility in vCenter Server is super limited.


In addition to the limited options for extending vCenter Server, there are also valid security concerns with resource utilization and opening up access to run arbitrary scripts directly on the VCSA, which we all know is a bad practice for so many reasons. What if we could easily extend the actions to a vSphere Alarm to send notifications to Slack or Microsoft Teams, automatically file an IT Ticket or run specific automation or remediations tasks!?

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Customizing vCenter Alarm Email Subject and Body

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One of the automated actions that can be configured when a vCenter Server Alarm is triggered is to send an email notification. Over the years, I have seen a number of requests and questions about customizing the email and whether an email template exists. I personally have not used this feature much which has been around since the introduction of vCenter Server and mainly because I have always worked in an environment where we had dedicated monitoring tools that provide notifications including emails.

Most recently, I noticed an increase number of questions around this topic and I was curious on whether a solution exists today or if this is still a gap today? A quick Google search landed me on this 2013 VMTN thread which included several workarounds that customers have found. However, the only viable "supported" and "persisted" option at the time within that thread was to use the vSphere API/PowerCLI to customize the alarm action.

While going through this exercise myself, I found that our vSphere UI has had some enhancements since that 2013 thread and I thought it was worth sharing an update in 2019 on how customers can customize both the email subject and body for vCenter Alarms. One thing to note is that there is no generic email template that can be edited, the email customizations are applied on a per-Alarm action basis and this is applicable for both vCenter Server running in a traditional on-premises environment as well as for VMware Cloud on AWS or Dell EMC.

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