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

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 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

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

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

We've discussed VCF Operations Dynamic Thresholds (DTs) a few times, mostly going into the details of what DTs are and how they are calculated. Aria Operations Dynamic Thresholds VMware Aria Operations Dynamic Thresholding The New Way of Evaluating Dynamic Thresholds in Aria Operations In this blog I'd like to detail the use of DTs in VCF Operations Alert Definitions. In relation to this, it's important to highlight the last blog listed above, namely that Alert Definitions

As you've likely noticed, there are times your vSphere VMs won't have the same value for Guest OS from vCenter and Guest OS from Tools . Guest OS from vCenter is set at build/deployment time and won't change. Guest OS from Tools is updated as the OS changes, is upgraded, etc. I wanted to know which of my VMs had an OS mis-match, so I built a quick Dashboard. This works for small environments, but what if I had 1000s of VMs to check. Another way to discover VMs with OS m

We blogged about VM downtime a while back. That blog introduced a Super Metric that calculated VM downtime in minutes based on a 5m collection interval. I'd like to do something similar for VM downtime in hours and days, but I don't want to show those metrics with decimal values, but rather as integers. For example, if a VM has been down 3.2 hours I'd like to show that as 3 hours. Similarly, if a VM has been down for 1.6 days I'd like to show that was 1 day until it's ac

We've discussed the VCF Operations Management Pack Builder (MPB) a few times so far: Aria Operations Management Pack Builder Building a Management Pack with the Aria Operations Management Pack Builder vROPs Management Pack Builder In this blog we'll detail the supported authentication methods and walk through an example of each, there are 5 total: No Authentication Basic Authentication Basic Authentication using Session Authentication Custom Authentication Custom Authenticati

We've discussed the new VCF Operations Fleet Manager introduced in VCF 9 a bunch already: VCF Operations 9 Password Management Updating VCF Operations Fleet Manager to 9.0.2 VCF Operations Fleet Manager Upgrade to 9.0.1 VCF Operations Fleet Manager SSH Connecting VCF Operations 9 Fleet Manager Deploying VCF Operations Fleet Manager via OVA Resetting the VCF Operations Fleet Manager admin@local Password Deploying Operations for Networks from VCF Operations Fleet Manager Deploy

VCF Operations 9 introduced the ability to manage VCF-related passwords from the Operations UI itself, here's what it looks like this. All screenshots here are taken from VCF Operations 9.0.2. You'll notice the VCF Management section first, this is the one that includes VCF Operations, Logs, Automation, and Fleet Manager. These passwords are monitored/managed through Fleet Manager itself. The UPDATE PASSWORD button is self-explanatory. The REMEDIATE PASSWORD button takes

I've been searching for un-used capacity lately, specifically ESXi Hosts that aren't being fully used. Here's what I came up with, if you'd like this Dashboard you can get it here . It was built in VCF Operations 9.0.2. Top left I've captured ESXi Hosts showing CPU and Memory usage metrics, along with maximums over time using View Transformations. Once an ESXi Host has been selected all other widgets will be populated. Top right provides metadata for the selected ESXi Hos

I have a Custom Group of VMs and would like to know the number of total VMs in my environment minus the number of VMs in this Custom Group. I first considered a Super Metric against vSphere World taking Total VMs minus Custom Group Population (which is a metric on all Custom Groups), but there is no relationship between vSphere World and Custom Groups, so this didn't work. Alternatively, if I had a way to identify all VMs in my Custom Group I could use that, as VMs have a cl

VCF Operations 8.18.6 just dropped , let's apply it! Go the Broadcom Support Portal and download it here. Log into the Operations admin UI and take your Operations Cluster offline. Provide a Reason. Once done go to Software Update. Point to the new 8.18.6 binaries and UPLOAD. Click UPLOAD. Click NEXT. Click NEXT. Click FINISH. The upgrade will take about 10m. Once done, the Operations Cluster will be back online and look like this in the Admin UI. Notice we are now at 8.1

I was trying to determine what ESXi Hosts and VMs in my lab had Secure Boot enabled, here's what I did. A couple caveats before we get started: ESXi Host Secure Boot property isn't available in Operations 8.18.x, it's not available until 9.0. You should confirm it's enabled in the Policy/s. VM EFI Secure Boot property is available in VCF Operations 8.18.x+, but must be enabled in the Policy/s. ESXi Host TPM Version isn't available until VCF Operations 9.0, so you won't see t