Using an EventHistoryCollector

An EventHistoryCollector lets you gather information about events that the server has generated. You create an EventHistoryCollector using the EventManager.CreateCollectorForEvents method.

The following steps show how to create an EventHistoryCollector.

Procedure

  1. Identify the type of Event objects that you want to collect, and create an instance of an EventFilterSpec data object that specifies your filter criteria. See Creating an EventHistoryCollector Filter.

    The EventFilterSpec includes an eventTypeId property, which you use to limit the set of collected event objects to specific types. You can also provide a time range in the EventFilterSpec, by defining an EventFilterSpecByTime data object for its time property. See the vSphere API Reference for details.

  2. Obtain the managed object reference to the EventManager on your server instance.
  3. Submit the filter and the reference to the server in the CreateEventHistoryCollector operation. The server returns a reference to an EventHistoryCollector object.

Results

After you have created the HistoryCollector, the server appends new objects that meet the filter criteria to the collection as they occur. The system appends the new object to the collection by placing it in the first position of the latestPage and it removes the oldest object from the collection. The latestPage property of the EventHistoryCollector object has a property that consists of the 1000 most recent objects in the collection. Use a PropertyCollector to obtain the items from the latestPage property.

A HistoryCollector exists only for the duration of the session that instantiated it. You invoke the DestroyCollector operation to explicitly eliminate the collector before the session ends.