Category: vRops

vRops undocumented API calls

Posted Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in vRops

Over time I have had the please of using different API calls to vRops. To begin with a lot around the official vRops API, as can be seen here. Some of it was documented in the internal API some were not which can be seen here. In this blog post I explorer some more API calls. The calls here is of a different nature. Were as the prior was around doing precis calls to get a specific result. These call are of a more generic nature. These have to do with the vRops environment. These calls can be used to […]

Least user privilege for Management Pack for Storage Devices

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, vRops

I recently installed Management Pack for Storage Devices at a customer site. The customer were required to use a service account which had limited privileges in vCenter. The account had the bare minimum needed for vRops to collect data from vCenter. Using the bare minimums for collecting data wasn’t sufficient for the Management Pack for Storage Devices. Found me self needing to find the least user privilege for Management Pack for Storage Devices. I looked at the documentation, but no answer there, so I then reached out to GSS which I later abandon as we were going no where fast. […]

Uninstalling vRops Management Pack

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in vRops

I recently had the pleasure of needing to uninstalling vRops Management Pack. Simply because the management pack wouldn’t start collecting after I upgraded the management pack. All you need is to ssh into a vRops node and execute three lines of commands. Cat the manifest.txt file of the management pack you need to uninstall and get the name Change directory to where the opscli tools are located Execute the opscli.sh script with a few paramenters Management Packs are located under /storage/db/pakRepoLocal/ as can be seen below by using “tab completion” (hit tab twice in a row). Now its just a […]

Custom vRops Content Pack for Log Insight

Posted Michael Ryom6 CommentsPosted in Log Insight, vRops

I work as a consultant. Mainly on vRops and Log Insight. This means that I have installed vRops and Log Insight quite a few times now. It also means that troubleshooting vRops is not that unfamiliar to me and what better tool to troubleshoot vRops with than VMware’s own Log Insight! In order to help me troubleshoot I have created a “content pack” for vRops. This content pack adds some more value, hence it’s not there in the current version of the vRops content pack. The content pack provides one dashboard with six widgets. The widgets are: vRops Webrequest respones […]

vRops Backup done right

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in vRops

vRops Backup Backing up vRealize Operations Manager or vRops isn’t as straight forward as one could wish for – There are some general things that need to be done right, but more important is some of the vRops specific quirks that needs to be done right in order to have a working and valid backup, which should be the biggest concern with taking backups in the first place. No one likes an inconsistent backup. Before I start with the the actual guide lines for doing vRops backup, I’ll point you to a great PDF which describes how to do backup […]

The overhead of running vRops

Posted Michael Ryom1 CommentPosted in vRops

Have a customer which did insourceing from a large three letter provider. This is in part the story of the benefit to their environment after uninstalling all the three lettered vendor’s software and the other part is to in-lighten you about the load that vRops puts on your environment. The overhead of running vRops – is small! Lets find out what is really the cost of running vRops in your vSphere environment! We know how much CPU, Memory, IOPS etc. vRops requires. You have sized your environment, so there should but no doubt about the cost of having vRops running. […]

ESXi IOStats – vmkmgmt_keyval

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in ESXi, Log Insight, Script, vRops

Just wanted to do a short post about vmkmgmt_keyval, as I think most admins only uses this tool for getting HBA driver/firmware versions, but you get so much more than just that. There is different forms of statistics in there, per target, per lun and block size. So first what is vmkmgmt_keyval ? vmkmgmt_keyval is an ESXi command which can be executed from ESXi’s direct console user interface (DCUI) or via SSH, in both examples you get access to ESXi Shell. The way I’m going to use vmkmgmt_keyval, is with an “-a”, after, just like in the example here: “/usr/lib/vmware/vmkmgmt_keyval/vmkmgmt_keyval […]

No Syslog Server is Configured

Posted Michael RyomLeave a commentPosted in Log Insight, NSX, Script, vRops

If you are running vRops and NSX, one of the mangement packs that is a must to install is the NSX management pack – On a side note remember to link Log Insight to vRops, that way when you install the NSX management pack in vRops, it will also install the NSX content pack in Log Insight and setup the alerts in the NSX content pack and forward them to vRops. The NSX management pack delivers both NSX network information as well as traditional network information from switches via SNMP and CDP/LLDP. It helps to provide better to understand of […]

vRops Symptoms & Alerts – Disk usage

Posted Michael Ryom4 CommentsPosted in vRops

Doesn’t seem like everybody really understands how good and how big a change vRops symptoms and alerts have gone through since version 5.x. vRops 6.x has an whole new way of informing about the status of an object which is called a symptom and on the alert side, symptoms are used to give the alert the correct properties to ensure that the alert carries the weight it ought to have. This way we can eliminate false positives, which is never wanted when doing monitoring. When that is said, vRops is only a monitoring tool. It doesn’t know how you would […]

vRops API – Working with Alerts

Posted Michael Ryom2 CommentsPosted in Script, vRops

This is another example and use case for using the vRops API to make some tasks easier. Let me set the scene. You have a large environment with maybe a 1000 datastores.  Quite a few alerts in vRops for datastores that are full or about to run full. Like the pro you are, you have of course datastore clusters in use. Like so many others the storage team uses an automated storage tiering, which forces us to disable some SDRS stuff. For many that means that SDRS is a manual task which can be run in order to distribute the […]