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

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