Virtualization is an awesome thing but just like any piece of your IT infrastructure, you need to be alerted when something goes wrong (and ideally, before something goes wrong). VMware vSphere has a powerful alerting or notification system built in called “Alarms” (call them whatever you want but if you want to use them in vSphere, you should start calling them “alarms”). Alarms can be configured to tell you when specific events, conditions, or states occur within the vSphere inventory.