Tag Archives: Aria

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Collect VM Notes in (Aria) vRealize Operations: A Step-by-Step Guide

One of the most common questions I’ve come across in previous years is how do I get the VM notes held in vCenter into vRealize (Aria) Operations?

Great news, in vRealize Operations 8.10 and later, you can now collect those properties for the virtual machines simply by enabling the property to be collected in your Policy.

Enable the Notes property on your Policy
  • Click on Policies under Configure in the left-hand navigation pane
  • Select your active policy that you want to alter
    • You may need to change multiple policies due to inheritance settings

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy

  • Select the Edit Policy in the far right-hand side

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy 2

  • Set the object type as “Virtual Machine”
  • Search “note” to curate the list to show just the property we are interested in
  • Expand Properties > System
  • Highlight Notes and click on “Deactivated” and change to “Activated”
  • Click Save

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy - Metrics and Properties - Virtual Machine - Enable System Notes

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy - Metrics and Properties - Virtual Machine - System Notes - Activated

Viewing the VM notes and adding them to a view and reports

Now it’s a case of wait for the collection cycle of your vSphere environment, below you can see an example of a virtual machine which is configured with a note. Any note changes will also be captured.

vROPs - VM Notes - Virtual Machine Property - System - Notes

Now let’s look at adding this property to an existing report as well.

In the below, I’m going to edit the view “Virtual Machine Inventory” which is used to power the out-of-the-box report “Inventory Report – Virtual Machines”

  • Under Visualize on the left-hand navigation, click on Views
  • Click Manage Views, find your view and click to edit
  • Go to Step 2 – Data
  • The Selected Subject will already be Virtual Machine (red box)
  • Search for Note (1)
  • Drag the note property to the data column (2)
  • Set a vanity name for the property (3)
  • Set a preview source (green box)
    • Ensure that the VM note displays as expected (4)
  • Click Update

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit View

Now let’s check this updated view is reflected in our report:

  • Under Visualize on the left-hand navigation, click on Reports
  • Click to edit your chosen report
  • Expand the Views and Dashboards section in the report
  • In the red boxes you can see the matching name of the view I edited in the above screenshots, and the VM Notes Column is present

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Report

Finally, when I run this report, I can see the additional VM note data added to the report.

vROPs - VM Notes - Run Report

Hopefully this new simple but much asked for feature will help in the ongoing management of your environments.

Regards

Dean Lewis

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How to Add vSphere Tags to vRealize Operations Alert Emails using a Custom Payload

Wondering how to add the vSphere Tag for a virtual machine to emails sent out for alerts? I recently came across this Reddit post, so decided to try out the Custom Payload feature from vRealize (Aria) Operations and want to share the steps I took to achieve this setting.

Here‘s how to configure a Payload Template and Notification to include the vSphere Tag:

Creating the custom payload template to include the vSphere Tag

To get started, within your vRealize Operations interface (SaaS or on-premises), go to:

  • Configure > Alerts
  • Click on Payload Templates icon
  • Click Add to create a new template

vROPS - Custom Payload - Alerts - Payload Templates

  • Give your custom payload template a name,
  • a description,
  • and set which outbound method it’s tied to. For my example, it will be email.
  • Click Next

Continue reading How to Add vSphere Tags to vRealize Operations Alert Emails using a Custom Payload

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VMware Aria Hub and AWS Setup: A Guide to Getting Started

In this blog post, I am going to take you through how to get started with VMware Aria Hub, and connect your first public cloud account, in this example, AWS.

What is VMware Aria Hub?

Before we dive into the technical pieces, what is VMware Aria Hub?

If we take the marketing definition:

VMware Aria Hub is a transformational multi-cloud management solution unifying cost, performance, and config and delivery automation in a single platform with a common control plane and data model for any cloud, any platform, any tool, and every persona

To make this simple, VMware Aria Hub is one of the key SaaS based services which sits at the center of the new VMware Aria Cloud Management platform. In which it gives you a single control plane to be able to access and interrogate data across the previously named vRealize Suite of products, now rebranded as Aria [insert product name], store metadata from all of your Infrastructure platforms (VMware, AWS, Azure, Google) and in the future, bring in data from third party systems.

This centralization of data is key. That part in VMware Aria, is called “Aria Graph”, which uses an Entity Datastore, a component derived from an existing VMware product, CloudHealth SecureState product (now VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds). This unique component, which is based on GraphQL, provides the product a unique way to store data, query into other products, and enable the consumer to write new data into the platform as well.

Let’s take this practical example, I have my application which is made up of the typical three tier app standards:

  • Load Balancer – AWS
  • 2 x Web Servers – AWS
  • App Server – AWS
  • Database Server – On-Prem DC – vSphere

All these components are deployed by Aria Automation (vRealize Automation), monitored by Aria Operations (vRealize Operations), with application logs sent to Aria Operations for Logs (vRealize Log Insight). The AWS environment is further secured by Aria Automation for Secure Clouds (CloudHealth SecureState), which ensures a number of specific resource tags exist, and they conform to the appropriate CIS benchmark.

Now If I need to query the following information for my application; App owner (who deployed it), Cost Centre, Resource Sizing, and active security alerts. I will need to pretty much either browse the UI or query the API for each of the products mentioned.

By leveraging the new capabilities of VMware Aria Hub, I can browse a single interface to reference all the components of my application, and where this data is stored into the other Aria products, it will pull that data through for me. This would be the same if I am querying for information via the VMware Aria Graph as well, for my programmatic access.

Watch the recording!

As a growing trend is video content, I’ve also produced a recording of the same content of this blog post! So, you can follow along below!

Getting Started with Aria Hub

First, you should have an email from VMware welcoming you to the VMware Aria Hub Free Tier. Below I’ve provided a sample email, there are three things to note;

  • You need to click on the links in step 1 + 2 to activate the VMware Aria Hub product within the VMware Cloud Services Portal, and enable the Free Tier for VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds, which provides the Public Cloud Security Features into the Aria Hub UI
  • To setup your VMware Cloud Services Portal organisation and enable the product, there is a PDF attached to the email showing the step-by-step instructions and screenshots if needed (shown in the green box).

VMware Aria Hub - Getting Started with AWS - Welcome Email

Once enabled, in the VMware Cloud Services Portal, click the VMware Aria Hub tile (as in the above email screenshot, step 3).

This will present you with the below opening page.

To get started, you only have one option here:

  • Click the “Connect your first data source” blue button.

Continue reading VMware Aria Hub and AWS Setup: A Guide to Getting Started

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vRealize Operations – Where did my “Object Relationships” view go?

The Issue

From vRealize Operations 8.6.2, it’s been noticed that the “Object Relationships” page has disappeared from the navigation column/settings pages in the product UI.

The Cause

This page is being redesigned by the VMware team, and is hidden from view in current releases.

The Workaround

You can manually access the page by going to the following web page suffix:

  • ui/index.action#configure/object-relationships
    • For example
      • https://vrops.vmware.com/ui/index.action#configure/object-relationships

vRealize Operations - Object Relationships

 

Regards

Dean Lewis