Aria Operations Diagnostics Certificates

Aria Operations 8.18 introduced a great new feature called Diagnostics, which we previously discussed here. It highlights VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) related Certificates quite nicely!

Clicking on VIEW DETAILS will give you more details on the Certificates being highlighted.

As indicated in the documentation, the Certificates being highlighted here are those related to your VCF components: vCenter, SDDC Manager, vSAN, NSX, and Aria. While this is a great start to VCF Certificate visibility, I'd like a bit more, Alerts for examples. I'm guessing these will eventually come in a future release, but let's create our own for now.

First, I'd like to know when Certificates will be expiring, maybe an Alert at 30/60/90 days before expiration. Go into Operations - Configurations - Alert Definitions and create your Alert.

You'll notice the Base Object Type dropdown, we'll select the Certificates object type from the VMware Infrastructure Health (VIH) Management Pack. If you recall, VIH replaced the SDDC Health Management Pack, and is now being used by Operations Diagnostics behind the scenes.

Select whatever Advanced Settings you'd like and click NEXT.

I've listed the available Metrics/Properties on the right and chosen the Property "Days to expire" to use as my Condition. I've configured my threshold such that it triggers, but you can define whatever you'd like. A tiered condition might look something like this.

Once done, click NEXT, and provide a Recommendation if you'd like.

Click NEXT and enable in the approriate policy/s. While we wait for the Alert to trigger, let's have a look at the Certificates being evaluated. They can be found via Inventory - Integrations - VMware Infrastructure Health.

As you can see, Days to expire is 178 on this Certificate, which is less than my threshold. Let's go check Alerts.

There they are! You can make Notifications on these as well if you'd like.