VCF 9.1.1 dropped last week, Release Notes can be found here. I'm upgrading one of my stand-alone labs right away, here's how I did it via PAK file. This approach is recommended for stand-alone Operations instances only, not VCF Fleet managed ones. First, I took a Snapshot of my Primary Node VM (only a single Node in this lab). I then logged into the Operations Admin UI and went to Software Update. Click INSTALL A SOFTWARE UPDATE. Browse for the 9.1.1 pak file and click UP

We discussed how to capture AD Groups and Users brokered by vIDB into VCF Operations 9.1 a few weeks ago. In this blog we'll do the same, but against 9.0.2, which is a bit different. First, we need an API Client and Secret, which we can get in the VCF Operations 9.0.2 UI at Fleet Management - Identity & Access - VCF Other Components. Click REGENERATE to regenerate a new Client Secret for your Client ID. Once you have your Client Secret you need to take your client_id:client

If you've done any capacity planning in VCF Operations you've likely used the What-If Analysis planning tool. It can be used for all sorts of use cases: adding/remove VMs from a Cluster, adding/removing ESX Hosts from a Cluster, and more. It'll provide Scenario Results that look something like this. In this case I'm running a Scenario to determine Cluster Capacity should I remove 1 ESX Host from it. The graphs confuse people from time to time, so let's go through them. F

I was doing some work in VCF Operations 9.1 and came across this, what?! I don't recall seeing it called out in the Release Notes but it is documented formally here. Now when I'm troubleshooting a VM from the VCF Operations Workbench I can SSH directly into it from Operations itself. You'll notice we support both credential based access and SSH Key based access. Executing remote command is also supported. Uploading a script and running it is also supported! All sorts of use

Looking to recover a mistakenly deleted VCF Operations Dashboard I discovered Dashboard backups on my Analytics Nodes. Specifically, they can be found in the following directory on every Analytics Node in your Operations Cluster: /storage/db/vcops/dashboard_dump From within there will be a directory for each Dashboard Owning User, mine looked like this. root@vcfops-135-110 [ /storage/db/vcops/dashboard_dump ]# ls -latr total 16 drwxr-xr-x 4 admin admin 4096 Jul 14 15:50 . d

I was creating a VCF Operations Automation Central Job for deletion of VM Snapshots in my lab and noticed this! I don't recall these options before 9.1, so I checked the Release Notes and sure enough, it's new! There were several Capacity related enhancements in 9.1, this is taken directly from the Release Notes. Capacity Enhancements Enhanced Storage Capacity Visibility. Improved visibility into storage usage across vSAN, VMFS, NFS, and vVol datastore types on clusters, hos

If you read the VCF Operations 9.1 Release Notes carefully you noticed the following: The behavior of the ${SYMPTOMS} placeholder in webhook notification payload templates has changed In 9.1, the ${SYMPTOMS} placeholder was redesigned from a plain string to a structured JSON object representing symptom sets, conditions, and related context. As a result, ${SYMPTOMS} can no longer be embedded inline with other variables or text within the same JSON value. For correct usage, pla

I see this question a lot: what's the difference between VCF Operations Maintenance Mode and vSphere/ESX Maintenance Mode? In short: VCF Operations Maintenance Mode puts the Operations Object into Maintenance as indicated by the Collection State of the Object which can be found in Infrastructure Operations - Configurations - Inventory Management - Collection States. When an Operations Object goes into Maintenance, Operations stops collecting data from it and stops generatin

I've seen this question a few different places recently, so figured I'd post it. Does the VCF Operations "admin" account expire? The answer is no (as of 9.1). Regardless of what gets set in Administration - Global Settings - User Access, the local admin account will not expire. The settings here apply to non-admin local accounts only. Hope this helps!

I have a VCF Operations 9.1 deployment using vIDB 9.1 to broker Identity and Access Management with Active Directory. I wanted to list AD Groups and Users via API, here's how I did it. First, log into VCF Operations to create your API Client and Token. I detailed how to do this a couple different ways previously: Accessing the VCF Operations 9.1 API using vIDB Tokens Creating an API Token in VCF Operations 9.1 using SSO Account I've created my API Client and Token here. Now

We've discussed the vCommunity Management Pack a few times already, just so you have all the articles in one spot here's the list: 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 vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations Part 5 Onur Yuzseven dropped the latest version of the VCF Operations vCommunity Management v0.3.0

In our last blog we discussed how to create a general API Client/Token to be used to access the VCF Operations 9.1 API. This blog will detail how to create an API Token for an SSO User. First, log into VCF Operations using your SSO credentials. Once logged in click the user icon top right. Click Generate API Token. Click GENERATE. Give it a Name, TTL, Description and click GENERATE API TOKEN. You now have your token, OIDC Issuer URL, and Token Endpoint URL, which you will ne

We've discussed authenticating with the VCF Operations API a couple times before: Authenticating with the Aria Operations API Authenticating to the VCF Operations API using vIDM Credentials This blog will discuss how to authenticate with the VCF Operations 9.1 API using vIDB Tokens, assuming you're running an integrated instance of vIDB. First, log into VCF Operations and go to Manage - Fleet Management - Identity & Access - VCF Overview and select our Identity Broker. From

For years we've been trying to get the Datastore Device Backing Extent Name in VCF Operations, commonly referred to as the NAA ID. To that end, we've been working to capture this property with the vCommunity Management Pack, which we will have news on soon. Earlier today I was discussing this with a customer and he said "you can already get that". My response was "Really, how?!". And he showed me, here's how. To start, have a look at the Datastore Metrics provided OOTB, s

There are two "admin" accounts in VCF Operations, one for the application itself and another in the OS. The application admin account is the one you use to administer VCF Operations itself, this is the one you can log into the UI as well as the admin UI with. To reset the application admin password you can do it two different ways: via the admin UI located at https://your_ops_fqdn/admin, then Administrator Settings - Change Administrator Password. When changing the admin p

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

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