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.
