Without any doubt configuring vRealize Operations to send log messages to a vRealize Log Insight instance is the best way to collect, parse and display structured and structured log information. In this post I will explain the major differences between CFAPI and Syslog as the protocol used to forward log messages to a log server …
ESXi Cluster (non-HCI) Rightsizing using vRealize Operations
vRealize Operations with its four main pillars: Optimize Performance Optimize Capacity Troubleshoot Manage Configuration provides a perfect solution to manage complex SDDC environments. The “Optimize Performance” part of vRealize Operations provides a wide range of features like workload optimization to ensure consistent performance in your datacenters or VM rightsizing to reduce bottlenecks and ensure best …
Parsing CSV Files using vRealize Log Insight
Last year I published a blog post focusing on the JSON parser available in vRealize Log Insight (https://thomas-kopton.de/vblog/?p=144) and I believe this could have been a beginning of a series – “vRLI Parsers “. In this post I will show how to configure and utilize the CSV parser using a very prominent and media-effective use …
How to Merge vROps Dashboards – Anatomy of the Content
Recently I was asked if it is possible to merge two, or generally speaking n different vRealize Operations Dashboards into one Dashboard. To answer that question and provide a procedure how to do it we need to inspect the internal structure of a vROps Dashboard. Anatomy of a vRealize Operations Dashboard As everyone knows vROps …
How to Configure Applications Monitoring in vROps 8.0
Applications Monitoring is an exciting functionality in vRealize Operations. To start monitoring one of the twenty services currently supported by vROps, the vRealize Operations Application Remote Collector (ARC) needs to be deployed and configured in vROps. The Application Remote Collector is provided as OVA and the deployment process runs similarly to any other VMware OVA …
Maintenance Mode for vRealize Operations Objects (Tags, Custom Attributes), Part 3
Part 1 and Part 2 of the “Maintenance Mode in vRealize Operations” blog series leveraged features and functionalities of vROps and vSphere which are directly related to ESXi maintenance to fulfil the requirements. What if you cannot use “Enter Maintenance Mode” in vCenter simply because there is no such option for e.g. Virtual Machines, Datastores …
Quick Tip – vROps REST API requests using RegEx expressions
The vRealize Operations REST API allows using RegEx expressions in various GET methods. Sometimes it is not clear how to use the expressions. Here a very simple example of using RegEx to retrieve vROps Virtual Machine objects, which have VM names starting with certain strings. Encoded URL – example: https://vrops-test.comp01.local/suite-api/api/resources?resourceKind=VirtualMachine&adapterKind=VMWARE®ex=s030v.*%7Cs030e.*%7CS030E.* Example in Postman (of course, …
Maintenance Mode for vRealize Operations Objects, Part 2
Part 1 of the “Maintenance Mode in vRealize Operations” blog series focused on a very basic scenario. Simplified, we turned off data collection and made the object basically not existent from vROps point of view as the requirements were straight forward. To accomplish this, we used the vROps Maintenance feature. In this part we consider …
Maintenance Mode for vRealize Operations Objects, Part 1
In this and following posts I will show you few different ways of putting vROps objects into maintenance. Objects in vROps – short intro The method used to mark an object as being in the maintenances state depends on the actual use case. As usually, the use case itself is being defined by: Requirements – …
vRLI JSON Parser and vRO Log Messages
Problem statement: In certain cases vRO workflow(s) are producing not very well structured log messages. “not well structured” means in this case that various workflow runs may generate log messages which could include variable information in terms of number of key:value pairs as well as the values themselves. For example we might have a workflow …