In the past I’ve written about the DPM capabilities within vSphere.  I’m seeing more and more of my clients starting to implement DPM within their enterprise production data centers.  As they do, the issue of integrating DPM with their data center monitoring tools keep coming up.  How do you prevent your data center monitoring tools from sending off a barrage of false alerts when DPM realizes it can save power by shutting down servers?

The answer lies within the white paper VMware Distributed Power Management Concepts and Use. (specifically page 13).

There are events that get triggered within vSphere when DPM decides to power down a server.  These events can be tapped into via the vSphere API.  By adding some logic to your data center monitoring tool of choice, you can surpress alerts related to DPM actions or deprecate their priority to informational.  This will allow the event to be logged but not distract your operations team with false positives.