In our last blog we discussed how to create a general API Client/Token to be used to access the VCF Operations 9.1 API. This blog will detail how to create an API Token for an SSO User. First, log into VCF Operations using your SSO credentials. Once logged in click the user icon top right. Click Generate API Token. Click GENERATE. Give it a Name, TTL, Description and click GENERATE API TOKEN. You now have your token, OIDC Issuer URL, and Token Endpoint URL, which you will ne

We've discussed authenticating with the VCF Operations API a couple times before: Authenticating with the Aria Operations API Authenticating to the VCF Operations API using vIDM Credentials This blog will discuss how to authenticate with the VCF Operations 9.1 API using vIDB Tokens, assuming you're running an integrated instance of vIDB. First, log into VCF Operations and go to Manage - Fleet Management - Identity & Access - VCF Overview and select our Identity Broker. From

For years we've been trying to get the Datastore Device Backing Extent Name in VCF Operations, commonly referred to as the NAA ID. To that end, we've been working to capture this property with the vCommunity Management Pack, which we will have news on soon. Earlier today I was discussing this with a customer and he said "you can already get that". My response was "Really, how?!". And he showed me, here's how. To start, have a look at the Datastore Metrics provided OOTB, s

There are two "admin" accounts in VCF Operations, one for the application itself and another in the OS. The application admin account is the one you use to administer VCF Operations itself, this is the one you can log into the UI as well as the admin UI with. To reset the application admin password you can do it two different ways: via the admin UI located at https://your_ops_fqdn/admin, then Administrator Settings - Change Administrator Password. When changing the admin p

If you're running VCF Operations 9.0 or 9.0.x and collecting data from NSX Manager/s, you might have come across this two Metrics: Specifically, NSX Manager Node Health Score and Node Status. I couldn't find either of them in the documentation (I've submitted feedback asking for updates), so I dug into them a bit and here are the details. NSX Manager Node Status is being pulled directly from NSX Manager, it is capturing this Status. The NSX Manager Status options are: Up, De

If you're running VCF Operations 9.1 you'll notice this small (but very powerful) new feature, allowing us to exclude VMs from the Rightsizing and/or Reclamation engines, here's what it looks like. Selecting EXCLUSION SETTINGS presents the exclusion criteria, which is based on vSphere Tags on VMs. Clicking in the Select Tags field presents all available VM vSphere Tags in Operations. I've selected the Function: Database vSphere Tag, to filter out my Database VMs. Once I clic

By default VCF Operations collects data on 5-minute intervals, which can be turned down as low as 60-second intervals per adapter instance. VCF Operations 9.1 introduces data collection as low as 2-second intervals for a subset of all available metrics, which we are calling Real-Time Metrics. Real-Time Metrics can be used for troubleshooting purposes via the Workbench, in Dashboards via the PromQL Widget, and extracted from Operations via the Real-Time Metrics API. They ar

VCF 9.1 dropped a couple weeks ago, with all sorts of goodies! Over the next few weeks I'll highlight the updates, we'll start today with what's new in Operations Dashboards and Views, here's a Summary: Dashboard Performance and Scalability Improvements Dashboard Sections Widget Descriptions and View Details Button Visual Enhancements New PromQL Viewer Widget Manage View Enhancement supporting filtering by Metrics/Properties Trend View Enhancement supporting sorting First, D

We've discussed the vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations several times here (and Hardware vCommunity): vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations Part 2 vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations Part 3 vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations Part 4 Hardware vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations In the Part 2 Blog we discussed the ability to monitor Windows Services and Events, but we skipped over a sm

This past week we dropped the latest versions of the VMware Aria Suite: VMware Aria Operations 8.18.7 VMware Aria Operations for Logs 8.18.7 VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18.0 Patch 8 VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.18.1 U6 (Patch 6) VMware Aria Automation 8.18.1 U5 (Patch 5) I'm running the following in my lab: VMware Aria Operations 8.18.6 VMware Aria Operations for Logs 8.18.6 VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18.0 Patch 7 VMware Aria Automation 8.18.1 U4 (Patch 4) Let's

I've been adding to an existing VCF Automation Blueprint, prompting the user for VM network placement, as opposed to a specific IP. In my environment, I have three networks to choose from, they look like this. Screenshots here are taken from VCF Automation 8.18.1. You'll notice I'm not using Network Profile Capability Tags, as I wanted more granularity, so I'm using Network Tags as shown here. I've given each Network a tag with its name. This allows me to prompt the user f

We've discussed VCF Operations and ServiceNow a few times: Aria Operations and ServiceNow Aria Operations and ServiceNow Part 2 Aria Operations and ServiceNow Part 3 Aria Operations and ServiceNow Part 4 As discussed in the Part 2 blog we are able to send Webhooks over to ServiceNow and open Incidents with the CI field populated. Depending on the Webhook Payload being sent, they look something like this. In this blog I'm using VCF Operations 9.0.2 and ServiceNow Australia.

I had a list of VMs and a list of Metrics/Properties I wanted to pull from the VCF Operations API, here's how I did it. A few API endpoints are relevant here, the first will get us our list of VMs, it is GET /api/resources. curl -X 'GET' \ 'https://your_ops_fqdn_goes_here/suite-api/api/resources?resourceKind=VirtualMachine&page=0&pageSize=1000&_no_links=true' \ -H 'accept: application/json' \ -H 'Authorization: OpsToken your_token_goes_here' Output from this call will include

I wanted to determine if my vSphere Clusters had enough CPU and Memory capacity to withstand one or two failed ESXi Hosts. Here's how I did it. First, I calculated several Super Metrics: Cluster CPU Free Cluster CPU Free after 1 Failed ESXi Host Cluster CPU Free after 2 Failed ESXi Hosts Cluster Memory Free Cluster Memory Free after 1 Failed ESXi Host Cluster Memory Free after 2 Failed ESXi Hosts These are relatively straight forward. You'll notice I'm taking the max() of t

I was trying to find VMs with duplicate IPs in my environment. There's no easy way to do this in VCF Operations as you can't compare VM Properties to other VM Properties in Alerts/Symptoms, so I started looking at VCF Operations for Logs and found this Alert Definition. As the Origin indicates, this Alert Definition comes with the VMware - vSphere Content Pack. Go to Content Packs - Installed Content Packs (in my case as it's already installed) - Alerts tab. Scrolling down

We've discussed VM Names using VCF Automation previously: Build and Rename VMs with VMware vRA VMware Aria Automation Custom Names I found a more efficient way to do this via two Blueprint Properties: name and hostname. My Blueprint requires the user to input both values, it looks like this (all screenshots here are taken from VCF Automation 8.18.1). # Created by Brock Peterson. formatVersion: 1 inputs: vm_display_name: type: string description: VM Display Name

Looking at my VCF Automation 8.18.1 Service Broker Catalog you'll notice some Catalog Items have detailed descriptions and some don't. Considering the Catalog Item called Generic VM, you'll notice it doesn't have a detailed description. This isn't defined in the Blueprint YAML or via Service Broker - Content & Policies - Content, but rather once you've published the Blueprint. Here's how. Go to Assembler - Design and select your published Blueprint. Select SETTINGS. Give

I was recently doing some Log Filtering in my VCF Operations for Logs 9.0.2 lab and noticed some nuanced behavior, namely when filtering logs based on text, this is what I found. In Log Management - Log Filtering you'll notice this. I'm trying to filter out any logs/events with the string "logout" in them, so I configured a filter against the text field and matches logout. What caught my eye right away is that there are only two operators here: matches and does not match. Y

I wanted to know when the administrator@vsphere.local password changed on my vCenter, this is how I did it. First, in vCenter, when you change the administrator@vsphere.local password you'll notice an Event is generated. The Event Type IP is com.vmware.sso.PrincipalManagement. To confirm these Events are being received by VCF Operations, you can check the EventList.txt file in /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/vmwarevi_adapter3/conf. We've discussed adjusting this

We've discussed vSphere Tags in VCF Operations a couple times before: vSphere Tags and Custom Attributes in VCF Operations vSphere Tags on Clusters in Aria Operations I wanted to capture all VMs with a certain vSphere Tag via the VCF Operations API, it didn't work exactly like expected, here are the details. The VMs I wanted to pull look like this. Looking at the Properties for one of these VMs via GET /api/resources/properties, it looked like this. So I'm looking for all VMs

For those if you running VCF Operations for Logs 8.18.x, ever wonder what this is? Yea me too. Documentation can be found here, but I wanted a bit more detail, here's what I found. By default, the Target should be the Operations for Logs Cluster VIP or the Primary Node in the Logs Cluster. I've not found a use case where one would configure this to be another VIP in your logs Cluster. This IP/FQDN is used in a couple different places. First, when sending an email notificat

We've discussed authenticating with the VCF Operations API a few times before: Authenticating with the Aria Operations API Aria Operations API Bearer Token Expiration I'd like to explore what this looks like when using vIDM credentials. First, you must configure vIDM as an Authentication Source, which we've also discussed previously. All screenshots here were taken from VCF Operations 8.18.1 and vIDM 3.3.7. Once vIDM has been configured as an Authentication Source, you must

We've discussed vSphere Tags and Custom Attributes a couple times before: vSphere Tags on Clusters in Aria Operations vSphere Cluster Custom Attributes in VCF Operations Both are very powerful, yet quite different in terms of how they present in VCF Operations. Let's have a look, all screenshots here are taken from VCF Operations 9.0.2. Here is a VM in my lab with both Tags and Custom Attributes on it. Over in VCF Operations, they look like this. The Properties themselves l

VCF Automation Network Profiles are a powerful way to define networks and associated settings to Cloud Accounts and/or Regions. I've recently deployed VCF Automation 8.18.1 (but this also works for VCF Automation 9 VM Apps) and would like to start deploying VMs on an IP Block for testing purposes. Here's how I did it. I first setup my Cloud Account via Assembler - Infrastructure - Connections - Cloud Accounts. This is your connection to the vCenter you'll be deploying VMs