Using Maintenance Mode in Aria Operations

For whatever reason, you want to stop collecting data against objects, or you'd like to disable Alerts against those objects, what do you use? Maintenance Mode, here's how!

There are several blogs I'd recommend that cover some of this topic already:

• Maintenance Mode for vRealize Operations Objects, Part 1 - written by Thomas Kopton, a peer VCF Operations and Automation Architect here at Broadcom

• Maintenance Mode for vRealize Operations Objects, Part 2 - also authored by Thomas Kopton

As indicated in Thomas' blog there are a couple different ways to enable maintenance mode, first the UI and second the API. In the UI go to Environment - Inventory and find the object you'd like to put in Matintenance Mode. Here's an example of putting a VM in maintenance mode.

You can do the same for ESXi Hosts, Clusters, Datastores, any Operations aware object type. But what does putting something into maintenance mode do? It does two main things:

• Stops collecting data from that object

• Stops all alerting against that object (and closes/cancels any existing alerts)

I put this VM into Maintenance Mode last Friday afternoon, as you can see here by the time it stopped collecting data and the giant yellow box at the top indicating Maintenance Window Active.

As soon as I put it into Maintenance Mode, all Active Alerts were closed/canceled as well.

As indicated earlier, you can put objects into Maintenance Mode via the UI or API, and you can tell Operations you'd like to manually remove Maitenance Mode, or have Operations remove it automatically based on your input.

Which begs the question: how can I tell what's currently in Maintenance Mode? You can do so by going to Inventory - Collection States.

You can do all of this via API as well, see Thomas' first blog.

Maintenance Schedules are another way to use Maintenance Mode, in this case defining a schedule under which objects/groups of objects can be collectively put into Maintenance Mode on a schedule. For example, if your ESXi Host patching window is Sunday from 1 AM CST to 5 AM CST, you might create a Maintenance Schedule for that, to prevent alerting during that window. It would look like this.

In order to use that Maintenance Schedule, you'll need a Custom Policy, like this.

All ESXi Hosts will now be put into Maintenance Mode each Sunday from 1 AM CST to 5 AM CST, to prevent data collection and/or Alert generation. Maintenance Mode and Maintenance Schedules are powerful, use them!