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.