Following the general availability of vRealize Operations (vROps) 6.0 and vRealize Automation (vRA) 6.2, VMware has released several integration and management packs that bring the solutions together to help streamline management between consumption and operations. These management packs connect external sources and “solutions” into vROps to provide a more holistic view of the ecosystem. vROps has provided this capability for a small set external sources for quite some time, but not until vROps 6 has that included more of VMware’s own cloud management solutions. Considering the number of VMware customers that purchase these products together (e.g. vCloud Suite or vRealize Suite), these integrations add a ton of overall value. One great example is the vROps Management Pack for vRealize Automation.

This Management Pack provides cloud and infrastructure administrators Tenant-level visibility into vRA with 3 out-of-the-box dashboards and inventory lists. For anyone running both of these solutions, this means you now have the tools and data needed to stay ahead of a growing cloud infrastructure, better maintain SLA’s per-Tenant, and have more more operational insight than ever before.
Installing Management Packs in vROps is fairly straight forward — download the pack (.pak) from VMware’s Solution Exchange, upload it into vROps, provide configuration parameters, and be on your way to management euphoria!
Wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy?
Installing the pack isn’t so much the issue — it’s making sure the environment and managed endpoints are properly configured to be integrated into. The Management Pack (MP) for vRA requires a bit of prep on the vRA side to ensure a successful configuration. I’ve seen several posts and questions (internally and externally) around this topic, suggesting it’s not as straightforward as one would hope.
This post is intended to get you past the basics so you can get up and running quickly…
Assumptions:
– vRealize Operations 6.0+ is up and running with no known config issues.
– You’ve downloaded the vROps Management Pack for vRealize Automation from the VMware Solution Exchange.
– vRealize Automation 6.2+ is up and running with at least 1 Tenant and no known config issues.
– A dedicated service account exists for vRA (highly recommended).
vRA Configuration:
This is the part that will cause most of the connection issues from vROps. It’s not rocket science, but the published documentation basically skips any details for the vRA prerequisites prior to installing the MP. I’ll break down the steps, but in summary:
  • ALL tenants must be configured with an Identity Store (that is, the same identity source…Active Directory in my case). This includes the system tenant, vsphere.local, even if you don’t intend on using it as an active Tenant.
  • The desired service account must be added as an Infrastructure Admin as well as a Tenant Admin for ALL tenants.
  • The “administrator@vsphere.local” account must be assigned Infrastructure Admin as well as Tenant Admin for the vsphere.local system Tenant.
Steps:
1. Log in to vRA’s default tenant, vsphere.local
2. From the Administration tab, click on Tenants..
3. Click on the vsphere.local Tenant to edit it
4. Ensure you have configured an Identity Store for the vsphere.local Tenant — this should be the same store (AD or LDAP) used across all Tenants you wish to monitor with vROps…
5. Click on the Administrators tab
6. Add “administrator@vsphere.local” (default local admin) as well as your vRA service account to both the Tenant and Infrastructure admin roles…
7. Edit each of the other Tenants and add the vRA service account to the Tenant and Infrastructure admin roles (this assumes the Identity Store is already configured, if not…configure that first). You do not add the vsphere.local administrator to the additional tenants…

8. You’re done here. Exit vRA and move on to vROps.

vROps Management Pack Config:

Now on to the vROps config. The management pack is uploaded and installed just like any other MP (assuming you’ve done this before)…1. Log in to vROps using an account with appropriate admin permissions2. Select “Administration” from the Home menu, then click on “Solutions”3. Click the green “+” to add a Solution (i.e. the Management Pack for vRA)

4. Click “Browse a solution…” and locate the .pak file downloaded from Solutions Exchange…

5. Follow the on-screen prompts to upload and install the management pack (.pak). Once complete, the “Management Pack for VMware vRealize Automation” will show up in the list of Solutions…

 

6. Click to highlight the MP for vRA in the list and select the configure gears from the menu above

7. Click on the green ” + ” on the left to add a vRA instance…

8. Under “Adapter Settings”, give the adapter a name and brief description (I use the name of the vRA VA because…that makes sense)

9. Under “Basic Settings” enter the URL of the destination vRA instance (as seen)
e.g. https://ezlab-vrava.lab.elzein.com/


10. Click the green ” + ” next to Credential to add your vRA connection credentials

11. In Manage Credential dialog, enter a credential name and the appropriate SysAdmin and SuperUser accounts.

– SysAdmin Username: this is the system tenant administrator account, which is usually “administrator@vsphere.local”.

– SuperUser Username: this is the account that was granted Infrastructure and Tenant admin roles for every Tenant being monitored (configured on the vRA side). It’s a best practice to use a service account for this.

12. Click OK to save your settings

13. Validate your configuration by clicking the “Test Connection” button. Anything other than “Test was successful” is a fail. If you receive any errors, go back and review all your settings, permissions, urls, etc…

14. All done. Assuming everything testing out okay you should be able to click the green “play” button and to start collecting data from vRA. Look for a collection state of “Collecting” and status of “Data receiving” shortly after starting. Again, if you see “failed” go back and check your config…

You should give collection several hours or even days (depending on the size of your environment) to collect enough relevant data. I’m running this on a new environment, so the data in my screenshots is underwhelming at this point. The MP automatically creates 3 Dashboards that can be viewed from the Home screen. Click on the desired tab or select them from the Dashboard List to view…

Dashboard: vRealize Tenant Overview
Dashboard: vRealize Automation Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring
Dashboard: vRealize Automation Top-N Dashboard

For an Inventory List — and the familiar Health | Risk | Efficiency badges — go to the “Environment” section and drill down to the desired object..you can select Tenant, Reservation, or Fabric views…

Environment Overview

There you have it. The official documentation does a good job at explaining where to go from here. So far you’ve got the basics — now you can build your own dashboards and views, create alerts based on thresholds, and so on.

The vROps Management Pack for vRA provides great insight into the various bits and pieces of a multi-tenanted vRA environment. This is a capability many have asked for and can now implement. But it doesn’t stop here. While this MP provides visibility to top-level objects, some may appreciate the ability to drill into vRA itself to monitor it’s many services and functions. For that, we have Hyperic.

vRealize Hyperic provides application-level monitoring and analytics at much greater granularity. And thanks to the new vRA plugin for Hyperic, we can now dissect the many pieces of vRA…then feed that all to vROps. If this is something you’re interested in, I’d highly recommend taking a look at my good friend Jon Schulman‘s detailed write-up “Monitoring vRealize Automation with vRealize Operations and Hyperic“.

Other Available Management Packs for vROps 6.x:

Enjoy!

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@virtuajad

6 Comments

  1. Thanks for the article, but vRA solution/adapter for vROps is not available on the page you shared it give error “Sorry, the page you requested was not found. ” I can check the pdf link but not the actual adapter.
    Can you provide the working link from where we can download the adapater

    Thanks

    Abhijeet

  2. I installed the vRA management pak and one thing I found out was I couldn't see the widgets on the dashboards and it seemed like it was collecting even though it was. I logged in as the local admin "all roles" and could see it.. I added the domain account that I was logging in as to "all roles" it started working.

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