Aria Operations Custom Group Custom Properties

I had a Dashboard (and View) with a list of ESXi Hosts, the parent Cluster they were in, but also wanted the name of the Custom Group those parent Clusters were in, but there was no easy way to do this.

The Custom Group name wasn't available as an ancestor/descendant object type property in the View. I couldn't create a Super Metric attaching the Custom Group name to the Cluster, as Super Metrics don't support strings. I was asking around internally and a colleague told me to check out Custom Group Custom Properties and ding ding ding!

When you create a Custom Group, in step 1 you give your Custom Group a Name, Description, Group Type, Policy, and more.

In step 2 you define group membership, in my case this is Clusters based on name.

In step 3 you can hard code inclusion/exclusions, I'm doing nothing here. Then in step 4 you're given the opportunity to assign a Custom Property, so what is this?

It's a Property Name and Type (string/numeric) and a Value (when object enters the group) and Reset Value (when object exits the group). The Property Name and Type are pretty straight forward, I've defined mine as follows, but you can name these whatever you want and assign values however you want.

The Value and Reset Value, as suggested by their descriptions, are set when objects enter/exit the group. In this case, when a Cluster enters the Custom Group it will be assigned a Custom Property (when it leaves the Custom Group, that Custom Property will be reset to None). It looks like this in the Operations UI.

We now have a Tag on the Cluster object type we can use in our View, it looks like this.

You now have a way to get the name of your Custom Group of Clusters into the Dashboard/View of your ESXi Hosts, just assign the Custom Group Custom Property to be the name of the Custom Group itself. To this point, I haven't used Custom Group Custom Properties, I'll definitely be using it more going forward. It's a really cheap way of assigning Tags to members of Custom Groups, enjoy!