ESXi Host Certificates in Aria Operations

We've discussed Certificate visibility in Aria Operations previously:

• Aria Operations Diagnostics Certificates Blog

• Capture Certificate Expirations with vRLI

I'm looking specifically for ESXi Host Certificates, which aren't exposed in the new Operations Diagnostics tile though, so where are they? Easy enough, the vCenter adapter actually captures them.

Looking at an ESXi Host in Operations, you'll see dozens of metrics and properties, one of which is a Property called Certificate Summary.

You can use these Properties in Dashboards, Views, Reports, Alerts, and more. I've created a Dashboard (and View) that show ESXi Host Certificate information. If you'd like this Dashboard it's available here. You'll notice I used the Instanced Property, the other Certificate related ESXi Host Property should be ignored and will be removed in a future release.

We can also create Alerts telling us when these Certificates are about to expire. Since we need Instanced Properties, we'll first need a Symptom (Conditions don't support instanced metrics/properties), something like this.

You'll notice I selected the Instanced Property and checked the "Evaluate on instanced properties" box, telling the Symptom to evaluate all instances of this property. If you'd like multiple thresholds with different severities, you'll need multiple Symptoms.

Next we'll define an Alert using this Symptom.

Once enabled in the Policy, it should Alert against all ESXi Host Certificates that are 490 days out from expiration, and sure enough it did! You'll want to adjust your thresholds as you wish, I used 490 days to get them to trigger, as several of them were that many days out from expiration

All sorts of things we can do from here: call a vRO Workflow to take action, open a ServiceNow Incident, make a Recommendation from within the Alert, and more. I hope this was helpful, enjoy!