With the April 2023 release of the VMware Aria Operations product for both SaaS and on-prem (v8.12), we have made some improvements to the metric-based search in VMware Aria Operations. In the past this type of search was only possible via the visualization in Views in VMware Aria Operations. This metric-based search will work on all types of objects, whether they are native objects, from a management pack or custom objects in VMware Aria Operations.
So, what does this new and improved search bring to you the user:
- Use metrics and properties associated with object types in your search queries.
- Add conditions using multiple metrics.
- VMware Aria Operations provides auto completion of options during your search to allow the user to learn the syntax quickly and easily.
- Automatic syntax checks provided by VMware Aria Operations during these searches.
- Launch the troubleshooting workbench from the search results.
- Save a screen snapshot or individual chart snapshot or save it to a pdf to be able to refer to later or send it to your team for further analysis.
- Filter your search results to narrow down the search.
- Even perform transformations or roll ups of the results!
Has this got you excited! Well let’s look at how to use this feature most effectively…
For a simple query –
- Start by clicking in the search bar the top in VMware Aria Operations and select the new Metric option.
- Use the autocomplete suggestions to create your query (notice that VMware Aria Operations will check the query at each step and prompt the next user actions)
- You can narrow down your results by playing with the query options to best suit your requirements and / or even use the child of option to further reduce the scope of your search.
For a slightly more advanced query –
- Start by clicking in the search bar the top in VMware Aria Operations and select the new Metric option.
- Enter the object type to search on just like the simple query and type in the metric and condition for your search.
- Next you can use AND / OR conditions to this to add another metric to your search (For e.g. CPU Usage % > 50 or Mem Usage % > 70). Note: You can use upto 5 different metrics in one query.
- You can toggle these metrics on the search results page.
- Or select an object from the list of parent objects displayed in the left pane to narrow down on a specific cluster or a specific host.
- Or use the roll ups or filter on the metric value ranges in the left pane in the search results displayed to further narrow down your search.
- You could also decide to navigate to the Troubleshooting workbench from the metric chart for an object to further analyze the results and look at potential other causes that could have led to the metric values shown in your chart.
Search results details
You could use different combinations of roll up options to look at or narrow on the results displayed.
For a slightly more advanced query you can also use transformations options:
- However when using the transformations option keep in mind that this is an expensive operation on the search engine and is therefore available when the total amount of objects for the mentioned object type are less than 200 and the transformations can work with up to 30 days of data at a maximum.
- There is a chance that the number of objects displayed by the query results is less than 200 yet the Transformations option is not available or greyed out, this could happen because there are more than 200 such objects in your infrastructure overall and the way to narrow it down would be to use the child of option to zero in or focus on a narrower results set.
Note:
In the past releases these roll up and transformation functions were only available via Views and if you were not comfortable with creating dashboards, views and reports, or your user role did not have the permissions for view creation, this functionality remained mostly hidden from you and did not allow you to take advantage of such a powerful feature. However with this release the power of this search is bubbled up to all users of VMware Aria Operations. Checkout the documentation for more details and examples.
This feature will evolve in the future versions of the product in its breadth and depth of the functionality made available to you. Your valuable feedback will help shape the look and feel and functionality of this feature, we therefore encourage you to give this feature a try and report your feedback via any of the official channels! You can try the product or Hands-on-Labs here or You can also learn more about other VMware Aria Operations features on TechZone !
