Aria Operations Super Metrics on Properties

I wanted to attach the vSphere Distributed Port Group (DPG) vLAN ID property to the VM/s using it, so I tried creating a Super Metric for it. This is the standard way of attaching metrics/properties (not strings) from one object type to another. My Super Metric looks like this.

I've defined the Super Metric on the VM object type with this formula:

max({‌vSphere Distributed Port Group: ‌Configuration|Policies|Security|VLAN ID, depth=1})

I've chosen the vDGP property I want, assigned depth=1 as vDPG is one step up from VM, and used the max() formula to convert the returned list of values (only 1) to a number. You could use min(), average(), etc. As you can see, it validates as well, but never returns the value I expect. It only returns 0. Why?

Because even though vDPG vLAN ID shows as a numeric, it's not!

How can you tell? Via the associated Adapters describe.xml file which can be found in: /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound. The vDPG metrics/properties are discovered by the vSphere/vCenter adapter, whos describe.xml file can be found here: /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/plugins/inbound/vmwarevi_adatper3/conf.

Searching the describe.xml here gives us details.

cat describe.xml| grep -i vlan_id
<ResourceAttribute dashboardOrder="200" dataType="string" defaultMonitored="true" isDiscrete="false" isProperty="true" isRate="false" key="vlan_id" maxVal="" minVal="" nameKey="2285"/>

As you can see, the vLAN ID is a "string", as revealed by its dataType, therefore our Super Metric won't render. I would prefer the VALIDATE on this Super Metric faileded, indicating the expression is invalid, but it doesn't for now. I've opened a feature request on this.

At least we now know how to determine the type of a Property, even if it does show as a number. And as you know, Super Metrics don't support strings, beyond using them in the "where" clause, which is why this Super Metric never returns anything other than 0.

As a workaround I created a View using multiple Object Types (support for which was introduced in Operations 8.18), so I can see the VMs associated vDPG vLAN ID, enjoy!