I rarely use the Top Alerts Widget in VCF Operations, but had a use-case that required it, so I explored it in a bit more detail. It is documented here, but it's not all that elaborate, so I explored and here's what I found: List Alerts in descending order of Severity: Critical, Immediate, Warning, then Info Can be configured to show Alerts for self and child Can be configured to show Alerts based on Badge Can be configured to list any number of Alerts (default is 5) Genera

As I was collecting VCF Operations CASA API endpoints to use in an upgrade script, it occurred to me that AI could do it much quicker. Here's what Claude came up with: Method Endpoint What it’s used for GET /casa/sysadmin/cluster/online_state Reads the cluster state and each node’s state. GET /casa/sysadmin/cluster/membership Backup state check. GET /casa/view/cluster Second backup state check. POST /casa/sysadmin/cluster/online_state?async=false Takes the cluster offline or

I was pulling ESX Host metric values from the VCF Operations API this morning and wrote a script to get just what I wanted, basically just curl commands against the REST API surface. As I finished I thought to myself, this could be much more robust and would be cool if it had a GUI option. Here's what I came up with! Everything is documented in the README.md, but here's an example of running it CLI. python3 vcf_operations_metrics_picker.py --server 192.168.135.113 --user ad

While writing the previous blog regarding Logs Data Sets another idea came to me, what if I wanted to provide visibility into just Logs via the VCF Operations 9.1.1 UI and nothing else, how would I do that? Here's how! Open the VCF Operations UI and go to Operate - Administration - Control Panel - Access Control Click ADD. Give the new Role a Name and Description and you'll need two Permissions: Access Control - Login Interactively Logs - Manage and View Logging in with a us

We discussed Operations for Logs Data Sets a few years ago, but it's changed since then, so let's take another look. VCF 9.1 changed the Logs architecture significantly. Logs went from being its own Cluster of VMs to a service running on the VCF Management Services Cluster. It no longer has its own UI, but rather is accessed via the VCF Operations UI. This changed how Logs Data Sets are configured as well. Logs Data Sets are a construct used to filter what VCF Operations u

We've discussed the VCF Operations Fleet Manager API introduced in VCF 9.0 a few times. VCF Operations 9 Fleet Manager API Delete Certificates from the VCF Operations 9 Fleet Manager API Retrieving Passwords from the VCF Operations Fleet Manager I'd like to change a password via the the Fleet Manager API, here's how I did it. First, you can access the VCF Operations Fleet Manager API here. Once there you'll be presented with the Swagger UI, remember to authenticate with Base

There are several vSphere Cluster Memory metrics in VCF Operations, formal documentation on these metrics can be found here. Not all of these definitions are as detailed as I'd like, so let's provide a summary. Total Capacity (KB) - total capacity in KB, API Key is mem|totalCapacity_average. Hover description is "Amount of physical capacity configured on descendant ESX Hosts". In reality this is the sum of descendant ESXi Hosts Memory as shown below. Usable Capacity (KB) -

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!

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 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