How to recover vRealize Operations admin account password

With vRealize Operations 7.0, VMware introduced a very simple yet powerful feature which would allow you to reset the built-in admin password of your vRealize Operations instance using recovery settings. I believe this is an extremely useful feature, as I have seen numerous deployments where admins have forgotten the admin password and are forced to login through the root account and run commands to reset the password.

Note - You can follow the procedure mentioned in this KB article to reset a forgotten admin password through SSH.

I would rather use this new feature and keep the password recovery process as simple as possible. Simple in this case provides security as well, since you do not have to share root passwords and run commands.

With vRealize Operations 7.0, once you login to the CASA (Cluster Administration) UI a.k.a. Admin UI, you will find a new section called "Administrator Settings".

This screen allows you to "Change Admin Password". At the same time you can enter the password recovery settings to ensure that in case you lose your admin password, you can use the recovery email to recover the password. In the above example, I have leveraged my SMTP settings to configure this.

Once saved, on subsequent admin login screen, you will notice an option of "Forgot Password"

Once you click on the forgot password option, you will receive an email on the registered recovery account email. Here is how the email will look like:

Upon clicking on the reset password link, you will be redirected to a page where you can reset the admin password.

Once the password is SET, you are good to login with the new password in the subsequent logins.

I think this simple addition would be really helpful with enhancing your operational efficiency. Go ahead and configure the recovery settings on your vROps instances before you forget your admin account password :-)

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Reset out of box content post upgrade or install of vRealize Operations

I have been several times about this and hence I thought I would quickly blog about this. With vRealize Operations, the out of the box content owned by VMware usually gets a refresh with each release. If you wish to get the new updated content, then you can leverage the reset out of box option during upgrade. I wrote about this more than 3 years ago here and this is still relevant.

I have been asked that if one needs to reset the out of box content later on then it is possible. The use cases around this are things like, you have modified out of box symptoms or alerts and you want to restore back to factory settings, or you have accidentally deleted some out of box content which you want to recover.

You can rest out of box content easily per solution. A solution is also known as a management pack which helps you connect to various endpoints to collect data and run analytics.

Here is an example on how you can reset content for vCenter solution:

1- Login with admin privileges or the built-in admin account.

2- Click on Administration -> Solutions.

3- Find the solution for which you want to reset out of box content.

4- Click on the Configure option.

5- On the configuration page click on the option highlighted below to reset out of box content.

6- Read the warning on the dialog box, check the option to confirm and click on ok to take this action.

Note - This process can take up to 30 minutes and will affect the data collection as stated in the warning.

Hope this helps.

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