I had a requirement today to create a custom alarm for vCenter 5.0, one that would alert me to a failed virtual disk consolidation event. This has been causing me a few issues and I want to know about it before the client does.

For anyone trying to do this, I found this page that tells all:
http://vmice.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/custom-alarms-for-events-in-vcenter-5-x/

Long and the short of it, you create a new alarm for an Event, and for the triggering event, you use the API definition. In this case, it was “com.vmware.vc.VmDiskFailedToConsolidateEvent”.

FYI, Veeam provide a nice breakdown of these API definitions:
http://www.veeam.com/support/vcEvents.html

Now, any time I get one of these events, my team will get notified and we can take action to rectify it.