If you're running VCF Operations 9.0 or 9.0.x and collecting data from NSX Manager/s, you might have come across this two Metrics: Specifically, NSX Manager Node Health Score and Node Status. I couldn't find either of them in the documentation (I've submitted feedback asking for updates), so I dug into them a bit and here are the details. NSX Manager Node Status is being pulled directly from NSX Manager, it is capturing this Status. The NSX Manager Status options are: Up, De

If you're running VCF Operations 9.1 you'll notice this small (but very powerful) new feature, allowing us to exclude VMs from the Rightsizing and/or Reclamation engines, here's what it looks like. Selecting EXCLUSION SETTINGS presents the exclusion criteria, which is based on vSphere Tags on VMs. Clicking in the Select Tags field presents all available VM vSphere Tags in Operations. I've selected the Function: Database vSphere Tag, to filter out my Database VMs. Once I clic

By default VCF Operations collects data on 5-minute intervals, which can be turned down as low as 60-second intervals per adapter instance. VCF Operations 9.1 introduces data collection as low as 2-second intervals for a subset of all available metrics, which we are calling Real-Time Metrics. Real-Time Metrics can be used for troubleshooting purposes via the Workbench, in Dashboards via the PromQL Widget, and extracted from Operations via the Real-Time Metrics API. They ar

VCF 9.1 dropped a couple weeks ago, with all sorts of goodies! Over the next few weeks I'll highlight the updates, we'll start today with what's new in Operations Dashboards and Views, here's a Summary: Dashboard Performance and Scalability Improvements Dashboard Sections Widget Descriptions and View Details Button Visual Enhancements New PromQL Viewer Widget Manage View Enhancement supporting filtering by Metrics/Properties Trend View Enhancement supporting sorting First, D

We've discussed the vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations several times here (and Hardware vCommunity): vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations Part 2 vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations Part 3 vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations Part 4 Hardware vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations In the Part 2 Blog we discussed the ability to monitor Windows Services and Events, but we skipped over a sm

This past week we dropped the latest versions of the VMware Aria Suite: VMware Aria Operations 8.18.7 VMware Aria Operations for Logs 8.18.7 VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18.0 Patch 8 VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.18.1 U6 (Patch 6) VMware Aria Automation 8.18.1 U5 (Patch 5) I'm running the following in my lab: VMware Aria Operations 8.18.6 VMware Aria Operations for Logs 8.18.6 VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18.0 Patch 7 VMware Aria Automation 8.18.1 U4 (Patch 4) Let's

I've been adding to an existing VCF Automation Blueprint, prompting the user for VM network placement, as opposed to a specific IP. In my environment, I have three networks to choose from, they look like this. Screenshots here are taken from VCF Automation 8.18.1. You'll notice I'm not using Network Profile Capability Tags, as I wanted more granularity, so I'm using Network Tags as shown here. I've given each Network a tag with its name. This allows me to prompt the user f

We've discussed VCF Operations and ServiceNow a few times: Aria Operations and ServiceNow Aria Operations and ServiceNow Part 2 Aria Operations and ServiceNow Part 3 Aria Operations and ServiceNow Part 4 As discussed in the Part 2 blog we are able to send Webhooks over to ServiceNow and open Incidents with the CI field populated. Depending on the Webhook Payload being sent, they look something like this. In this blog I'm using VCF Operations 9.0.2 and ServiceNow Australia.

I had a list of VMs and a list of Metrics/Properties I wanted to pull from the VCF Operations API, here's how I did it. A few API endpoints are relevant here, the first will get us our list of VMs, it is GET /api/resources. curl -X 'GET' \ 'https://your_ops_fqdn_goes_here/suite-api/api/resources?resourceKind=VirtualMachine&page=0&pageSize=1000&_no_links=true' \ -H 'accept: application/json' \ -H 'Authorization: OpsToken your_token_goes_here' Output from this call will include

I wanted to determine if my vSphere Clusters had enough CPU and Memory capacity to withstand one or two failed ESXi Hosts. Here's how I did it. First, I calculated several Super Metrics: Cluster CPU Free Cluster CPU Free after 1 Failed ESXi Host Cluster CPU Free after 2 Failed ESXi Hosts Cluster Memory Free Cluster Memory Free after 1 Failed ESXi Host Cluster Memory Free after 2 Failed ESXi Hosts These are relatively straight forward. You'll notice I'm taking the max() of t

I was trying to find VMs with duplicate IPs in my environment. There's no easy way to do this in VCF Operations as you can't compare VM Properties to other VM Properties in Alerts/Symptoms, so I started looking at VCF Operations for Logs and found this Alert Definition. As the Origin indicates, this Alert Definition comes with the VMware - vSphere Content Pack. Go to Content Packs - Installed Content Packs (in my case as it's already installed) - Alerts tab. Scrolling down

We've discussed VM Names using VCF Automation previously: Build and Rename VMs with VMware vRA VMware Aria Automation Custom Names I found a more efficient way to do this via two Blueprint Properties: name and hostname. My Blueprint requires the user to input both values, it looks like this (all screenshots here are taken from VCF Automation 8.18.1). # Created by Brock Peterson. formatVersion: 1 inputs: vm_display_name: type: string description: VM Display Name

Looking at my VCF Automation 8.18.1 Service Broker Catalog you'll notice some Catalog Items have detailed descriptions and some don't. Considering the Catalog Item called Generic VM, you'll notice it doesn't have a detailed description. This isn't defined in the Blueprint YAML or via Service Broker - Content & Policies - Content, but rather once you've published the Blueprint. Here's how. Go to Assembler - Design and select your published Blueprint. Select SETTINGS. Give

I was recently doing some Log Filtering in my VCF Operations for Logs 9.0.2 lab and noticed some nuanced behavior, namely when filtering logs based on text, this is what I found. In Log Management - Log Filtering you'll notice this. I'm trying to filter out any logs/events with the string "logout" in them, so I configured a filter against the text field and matches logout. What caught my eye right away is that there are only two operators here: matches and does not match. Y

I wanted to know when the administrator@vsphere.local password changed on my vCenter, this is how I did it. First, in vCenter, when you change the administrator@vsphere.local password you'll notice an Event is generated. The Event Type IP is com.vmware.sso.PrincipalManagement. To confirm these Events are being received by VCF Operations, you can check the EventList.txt file in /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/vmwarevi_adapter3/conf. We've discussed adjusting this

We've discussed vSphere Tags in VCF Operations a couple times before: vSphere Tags and Custom Attributes in VCF Operations vSphere Tags on Clusters in Aria Operations I wanted to capture all VMs with a certain vSphere Tag via the VCF Operations API, it didn't work exactly like expected, here are the details. The VMs I wanted to pull look like this. Looking at the Properties for one of these VMs via GET /api/resources/properties, it looked like this. So I'm looking for all VMs

For those if you running VCF Operations for Logs 8.18.x, ever wonder what this is? Yea me too. Documentation can be found here, but I wanted a bit more detail, here's what I found. By default, the Target should be the Operations for Logs Cluster VIP or the Primary Node in the Logs Cluster. I've not found a use case where one would configure this to be another VIP in your logs Cluster. This IP/FQDN is used in a couple different places. First, when sending an email notificat

We've discussed authenticating with the VCF Operations API a few times before: Authenticating with the Aria Operations API Aria Operations API Bearer Token Expiration I'd like to explore what this looks like when using vIDM credentials. First, you must configure vIDM as an Authentication Source, which we've also discussed previously. All screenshots here were taken from VCF Operations 8.18.1 and vIDM 3.3.7. Once vIDM has been configured as an Authentication Source, you must

We've discussed vSphere Tags and Custom Attributes a couple times before: vSphere Tags on Clusters in Aria Operations vSphere Cluster Custom Attributes in VCF Operations Both are very powerful, yet quite different in terms of how they present in VCF Operations. Let's have a look, all screenshots here are taken from VCF Operations 9.0.2. Here is a VM in my lab with both Tags and Custom Attributes on it. Over in VCF Operations, they look like this. The Properties themselves l

VCF Automation Network Profiles are a powerful way to define networks and associated settings to Cloud Accounts and/or Regions. I've recently deployed VCF Automation 8.18.1 (but this also works for VCF Automation 9 VM Apps) and would like to start deploying VMs on an IP Block for testing purposes. Here's how I did it. I first setup my Cloud Account via Assembler - Infrastructure - Connections - Cloud Accounts. This is your connection to the vCenter you'll be deploying VMs

We've discussed exporting/importing content from VCF Operations a couple times: vROps Content Management and the Suite-API Aria Operations Content Management I'd like to highlight a few things here when individually exporting/importing VCF Operations content. All screenshots here are taken from VCF Operations 9.0.2. The first use case is almost always Dashboards, and it needs to be highlighted that Dashboard exports do NOT include underlying Views. For example, let's export

We've discussed VCF Operations Alert Notifications many times before: Aria Operations and ServiceNow Send VMware Aria Operations Alerts to Slack Send Aria Operations Alerts to Google Chat Send vROps Alerts to Microsoft Teams vROps Alert Notifications vROps SNMP Plugin and ServiceNow I recently discovered DX Operational Observability ( DX O2 ), Broadcom's AI Ops and Observability platform which can help with Alert correlation and enrichment. DX O2 can receive Alerts from just

I've been using OpenAI ChatGPT for years now, but in recent months I've been hearing more and more about Anthropic Claude, so figured I'd check it out. VCF Operations Super Metrics is a perfect use case for Claude. While we've made the creation of Super Metrics much more intuitive than they used to be, they can still be tricky. Let's see how Claude does with them. We'll first start with an easy one, which is quite common, a Super Metric to calculate the average CPU Usage %

In VCF Operations 9 we've made the integration between VCF Operations and Operations for Logs even more robust. There are several different places you can view logs in VCF Operations, Infrastructure Operations - Analyze is the first. This provides the general logs viewing experience: y ou can search logs here, compare logs, save queries, use extracted fields, and more. This is similar to the experience from the Operations for Logs UI itself. The second place you'll find log