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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Reset out-of-the-box content during vROps upgrade!

VMware recently release vRealize Operations Manager 6.2 (now 6.2a with the recent patch). If you are on a version of vROps 6.x or above and trying to upgrade to the 6.1 or 6.2, you will get an option during upgrade to reset out-of-the-box content when you install the software update.

Here is how the setting would look like during the upgrade:-

The release notes over here explain this setting:-

I have had many customers ask me the meaning of this statement as they are concerned about losing customizations they have done in their vROps environments. 

This statement means that, if you are using any of the out-of-the-box Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations or Policies which came with the product when you first installed it, checking this option may reset them back to default (with newer settings wherever applicable).

This also applies if you have just renamed the out of the box content. A best practice would be to clone out of the box content and then do further customizations to avoid resets of your valuable customizations.

So if you have not modified the existing Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations or Policies and have created everything from scratch then those configurations would not be harmed by checking this option. It is a good idea to check this option to get the latest and the greatest released with the product, however be CAREFUL and assess your Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations & Policies before taking a call.

A GOOD PRACTICE to manage Alerts, Symptoms, Recommendations & Policies would be to NEVER customize the one's available out of the box, but to Clone from the existing one's and customize the cloned Alert, Symptom, Recommendation or Policy. This way you will never be dependent on the out of the box content and would never be impacted if VMware provides new updates to those in the upcoming releases. Another benefit is that, you will never mess up the original configuration in case you are trying to test drive stuff.

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