How-to Manage Messages

Introduction

The VSS API runs periodic checks to ensure the VSS Guidelines are in compliance. This is the case for Virtual Machine snapshot life time, Virtual Machine disk consolidation, VMware Tools version status and running status, session invalidation, etc. Also, the API notifies via email upon every request submission/completion or error. However, these checks could produce a considerable amount of emails and in order to address this issue, the API introduced User Messages, which hold simple subject/body objects.

By the end of the week, you can receive a Messages Digest containing all messages which have not been read. This reduces a daily email message per VM to one every seven days. This feature is even more useful when your Request Notification has been set to message or even optimized by following Manage Object Request Notifications to update your notification settings.

If you would like to receive the Messages Weekly Digest, please update your notification settings via either the Cloud Portal, VSS CLI or VSS API.

Step-by-step guide using the Cloud Portal

The following guide, shows how to list, read, and acknowledge messages sent by the Administrator User (API checks or request notification) via the cloud portal.

1. Login to https://vss-portal.eis.utoronto.ca

2. If you have available messages, the Bell icon next to your account Gravatar image should display a number

   Open

   

    

3. Click on the Bell icon and will take you to the Messages dashboard, where you can find both unread and acknowledged messages :
   

4. To Read a message, just click on the subject:
   
   

   Open

   

5. To Acknowledge click on Confirm.

6. Note the message changed to acknowledged  (confirmed):
   
   

7. To Read a message, just click on the subject:
   
   

8. If you would like to browse old messages, click on the top-left menu and select Messages:
   
   

Step-by-step guide using the VSS CLI

1. Login to https://vss-cli.eis.utoronto.ca with your VSS Credentials or use your local VSS CLI install.

2. Initialize VSS CLI with vss-cli configure mk:
   
   

3. Execute the following command to list messages with Created status:

   vss-cli message ls -f status,eq,Created id kind subject status ---- ------ ------------------------------- -------- 2 Notice VM Disks Consolidation Required Created

4. To Read the message, simple execute vss-cli message get <message-id>:

   vss-cli message get 3 ID : 3 CREATED : 2018-02-24 Sat 09:00:04 EST UPDATED : 2018-03-01 Thu 15:39:55 EST KIND : Notice STATUS : Acknowledged FROM : vsswebservices SUBJECT : VM Disks Consolidation Required TEXT : 50127647-7fb8-57e7-0d16-103cc5df643e 1712T-Test-VM-With-19-Cha

    

5. To Acknowledge the message execute vss-cli message set ack <message-id>:

   vss-cli message set ack 2 [####################################] 100%

   
   
   

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