For the purpose of this example, we will configure the Standard Email plugin. We will be triggering a notification alert when a host loses its connection to the vCenter Server and raises a critical alert.

Perform the following steps to configure the SMTP Relay:

1. Go to the User UI on the Master Replica node by navigating to the following URL: https://<FQDN or IP of the Master Replica Node>/ui. Navigate to the Alerts section and Alert Settings. Select Notification Settings and click the plus (+) sign to add a new notification rule.

2. First, you need to configure the SMTP Relay options for the Standard Email plugin. Select Standard Email Plugin from the drop-down menu. In the Add/Edit Outbound Instance window, fill in the information required:

3. In the Edit Rule window, fill in the following general information:
   • Name: Name for the rule, for example, ESXi Host System is Down
   • Method: Select Standard Email Plugin from the drop-down menu. Select the SMTP Relay you configured earlier. Configure Recipient(s) and optionally enter values for Notify again, Max Notifications, Delay to notify and Description fields.

Under Filtering Criteria, fill in the following information: Notification Trigger: Select Alert Definition from the drop-down menu. Select the Host has lost connection to vCenter Server predefined alert.

• • Criticality: Select Critical from the drop-down menu.
  • Under Advanced Filtering, you can optionally define advanced filtering criteria. We will not be defining any for this example.

Your rule configuration should look similar to the following one. Click Save to save the rule:

4. Now when a host system goes down, it will trigger an critical health alert. This in turn triggers a notification alert which will send an email to the recipients defined in the rule.

Now that you have vRealize Operations up and running, it’s a good time to gather the different business groups and teams responsible for the different parts of the infrastructure, such as storage, networking, virtualization, and applications, and discuss for which alerts in vRealize Operations you should be sending email notifications. It’s not recommended to send out notification emails for every alert vRealize Operations generates, but rather filter out only the important and critical ones.