License Visibility with Aria Operations

Aria Operations 8.18 introduced some licensing capabilities. As indicated in the Release Notes, we now have the ability to do the following:

• Ability to manage VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation licenses by adding them in VMware Aria Operations.

• Ability to access consumption for all your licenses across multiple vCenters from a single pane of glass. 

• Existing VMware Aria Operations licensing has been moved under Legacy Licensing. 

In this case, Operations has connected to several different vCenters and is pulling License information and consumption back. This gives us great visibility into what Licenses are being used where and how much is being used. If you're not seeing data under Subscriptions - License Management confirm your vCenter Adapter Instance credential/s have the proper permissions. The Note in the documentation shows exactly what permissions you need:

VMware Aria Operations can use the default or the action credentials to communicate with vCenter for licensing purposes. Per vCenter, make sure the credentials you choose have the Global.Licenses privilege assigned and are a member of the LicenseService.Administrators Single Sign-On group. If you choose the default credentials, make sure no action credentials are configured.  If action credentials are provided, those are used to perform the operation, if not, the default credentials are used.

You'll notice a tab called Usage Analytics which gives us history into License Usage as well.

This is all great, we now can see the Licenses being used, how much of them are used, the assets consuming them, and more. But I'd like to create Dashboards, Views, and Reports to show this data a bit differently, which requires License Objects/Object Types/Metric/Properties. I couldn't find License Object Types until I saw a project my teammate Scott Bowe was working on, thanks for sharing Scott!

The VMware Infrastructure Health (VIH) Management Pack captures everything we need! So I created a Dashboard/View to show my vCenters and the licenses each was using.

As you can see, there is an Object Type called Licensed vCenter created by the VIH Management Pack, which gives us the vCenter and concatenates the License to it. To make this a bit clearer, I added the vCenter Address Property and Licensed Asset Counts/Used Metrics. I also added some related Metrics/Properties from the License Object Type which is also created by the VIH Management Pack.

This allows you to see the licenses a vCenter is actually using, along with usage metrics. I'd like to see ESXi Hosts (CPU Sockets and Cores) in each as well, but that's not available yet, I've opened a feature request for it. If you'd like this Dashboard (and Views) you can get them here.

In addition to pulling License Keys from connected vCenters, you can also add License Keys in Operations, but there is a known issue, so keep this in mind.