Ways to Limit what VCF Operations is Collecting

There are several ways to limit what you collect with VCF Operations. We discussed two of them previously here, namely License Groups and User Permissions. But there is another way using Custom Groups and Maintenance Mode, here's how.

Create a Custom Group with the objects you don't want to collect from, mine looks like this.

It includes the Cluster I don't want to collect from and it's children: ESXi Hosts, VMs, and Datastores (you can include whatever you'd like here).

Next create the Maintenance Schedule to use, which is just a window of time, mine looks like this.

It's a window that stops on 7.21.2030, but you could configure this to be whatever you want, this is the date the Maintenance Schedule will stop and Operations will resume collecting data.

Next, define a Policy using that Maintenance Schedule and Custom Group, mine looks like this.

The Maintenance Schedule is where you tell the Policy what Object Types to apply the Maintenance Schedule to, mine looks like this.

The Groups and Objects is the Custom Group against which you want this Policy run, mine looks like this.

One thing to notice here: once the objects in the Custom Group go into Maintenance Mode the become "invisible" and won't show as being members of the Custom Group, which is why you see 0 Objects here. But rest assured, they are in fact in Maintenance Mode, so no data is being collected from them. We can confirm by going directly to the Objects themselves.

Here for example is the Cluster we are excluding, notice the yellow Maintenance Window Active notice. Checking a couple other Objects in the Custom Group show the same.

We are now no longer collecting data from any of the Objects in our Custom Group, which is what we wanted. Thanks to Broadcom Technical Support Engineer Matt Goodnow for his inspiration and collaboration on this blog!