Installing the vROps Management Pack for vRealize Automation

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 “[email protected]”.

– 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: