Exporting Content with vRealize Operations Manager Policies

Policies as we know are the control center of vRealize Operations Manager. In the vRealize Operations Webinar Series, we have been running for the entire year, we have seen that policies needs to be touched, configured, modified etc, with every feature or functionality available out of the box or being customized with vROps. This pretty much aligns with all the products of VMware. They all have a theme of Policy Based Control which allows you to built, run and operate the Software Defined Datacenter components by tying them down to your business policies.

With this article, I wanted to highlight, that policies is not about configuration only, they are also about content. In a recent project, I discovered that with vROps 6.2.1, you can utilize policies for exporting and importing content from one vROps instance to another. This includes:-

• Alert Definitions

• Symptom Definitions

• Recommendations, &,

• SuperMetrics

This in my opinion is a killer feature as it allows you to create content once and distribute the same by a simple export and import of a policy. This opens a lot of avenues to collaborate and share meaningful content with community.

While the above mentioned content can be exported & imported easily, things like Views, Dashboards and Reports still need to be exported and imported individually. I believe with time, VMware should work towards unifying & ease content management by making everything exportable and importable like LogInsight content packs.

I will not go into the details of how to Export & Import policies, since I have already done an article on this sometime back which is applicable today as well. I will utilize this feature and work on creating a collaborative content library where you can share content with policies.

Stay tuned for more fun on vROps!!!

Part 15: Re-initiate Monitoring Goals Wizard in vRealize Operations 6.0!

One of the post in my vROps 6.0 Tutorial was about understanding the Monitoring Goals in vROps 6.0. I would highly recommend that you read that post before you read this article as this one is a follow up on that post where at the end I mentioned :

"As I mentioned before, any changes to the policy now cannot be done through this wizard. You would have to manually edit the policy now to make changes or you could use my next post where I will tell you a hack which will allow you to re-run this wizard once again."

The above statement means that once you setup a vCenter Adapter to monitor a vCenter Server, you would be asked to define your monitoring goals. These monitoring goals basically translate into the default policy which are then applied on all the objects which are being monitored by that vROps instance. When you read the above mentioned article you would understand how this wizard helps you set the policy for the first time. Unfortunately, you can only run this widget once and set the default policy and to make any subsequent changes to the policy, you would have to manually edit the default policy which could be a cumbersome task if you are not well versed with how policy works!

While you do not have the option to re-run the wizard, there is a hack which was discovered when this question was asked by my colleague Woflgang Stichel who is a Business Solution Architect at VMware. His question was that one of his customer has not selected the right options while responding to the monitoring goals because of which vROps default policy is not monitoring the datastores at all. He wanted to re-run this wizard somehow to select the right options instead of diving into the policies.

Before I share the hack with you, I must mention that this is NOT a supported method and please do it at your own risk :-)

Part 12: Monitoring Goals in vRealize Operations Manager 6.0

In the past I have written about vCenter Operations / vRealize Operations policies and how they play an important role in the way the analytics and capacity engine run to process the collected metrics in your environment. 

With the release of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0, the policies do not change much, however the way you configure them has changed a bit. With the introduction of a number of third party management packs and vROps treating all the objects as FIRST CLASS CITIZENS, it is important that with each management pack you have a specific set of policy which would define the monitoring criteria for a particular object being monitored by vRealize Operations. For instance, if you install a NetApp management pack or an EMC Storage Analytics management pack, then, you should either define your monitoring goals for the objects it brings into the system for monitoring or a better option would be to get this as a pre-defined policy from the management pack vendor. In this case, EMC or NetApp would be in a better position to tell you as to what are the things to monitor on their storage array than VMware.