From Code to Cloud: Finding the Man Behind The Curtain

Let’s take a journey through the software development lifecycle, diving into the world of computing, memory, storage, networking, and beyond. This is going to be a ride through all the layers that make up the internet’s magic curtain to discover what lies behind it. The Birth of an Application Every great app starts with an idea. Imagine a student, Alex, who wants to create a social networking platform specifically [Read More…]

Recreating Rightsizing/Reclaim Tools in VIEWS

You’re likely aware that VCF Operations includes powerful purpose-built interfaces designed for quick detection and remediation of under/over-powered virtual machines in your inventory. However, if you have tried to create a user that only has access to a subset of VMs and not the entire inventory of VMs, then you may have noticed that the Rightsizingi/Reclaim tools no longer work for that user. Below is a quick workaround for [Read More…]

Part 2. Forwarding AWS S3 Logs to Aria Operations for Logs

In Part 1, we created an EC2 instance on AWS, used a cron job to run a bash script which continously exports logs to a file on the ec2 instance, and used another bash script (automated by a cron job) to upload the logs to an s3 bucket. Now, using FluentD let’s get those logs from s3 pulling over into our local Aria Operations for Logs. First, we’ll want [Read More…]

Part 1. Forwarding AWS S3 Logs to Aria Operations for Logs

Aria Operations for Logs has a large marketplace of content packs designed to import logs from many types of 3rd party applications..but collecting logs into Aria Operations On Prem from native public clouds is not so fortunate, yet anyways. To hold us over till a native solution surfaces, there are workarounds and I’ll detail one below which relies on bash scripts, cron jobs, and fluentd to get the job [Read More…]

How $200 of monitoring tools created $50,000 of value

If you aren’t on the front lines of infrastructure monitoring and automation, it might be difficult to appreciate what great monitoring and automation tools can do to innovate for your organization. But even when equipped with the best tools, big organizations move slowly and require a lot of stakeholder input prior to taking action.. so even the biggest wins can happen in slow motion…which isn’t very satisfying. We like [Read More…]

Monitoring Custom Groups On Custom Dashboards

So you’ve created your Custom Group Types & Custom Groups…now you can monitor them on your Custom Dashboard. Note: This is a continuation from this post here which explains how to create Custom Group Types and Custom Groups. 2nd Note: We won’t cover all the steps of building custom dashboards, just the necessary ones in regards to leveraging Custom Groups. First, you’ll need to click Edit Dashboard. At the [Read More…]

Creating Custom Group Types and Custom Groups

Quickly organize your vms, hosts, clusters, and other objects manually or by filter criteria. As pictured above, it’s helpful to create CUSTOM GROUPS of resources so that you can segment and monitor them as a whole or as parts. It’s also beneficial to organize these CUSTOM GROUPS into folders (GROUP TYPES) to keep your ever-growing lists of lists organized. We’ll discuss how to accomplish both of these workflows below. [Read More…]

ARIA Operations – Bulk API Commands

While ARIA Operations is a robust & complex infra monitoring application, not every tool or functionality you’d need can be found. But via the ARIA Operations API, you can close that gap. Pictured below is the built-in Swagger interface which can be found by appending “/suite-api” to your Aria Operations URL example: vr83-bpeterson.tvs.vmware.com/suite-api My colleague Brock Peterson has a great blog on authentication and understanding the hundreds of objects [Read More…]

Part 2. What Software Development Can Learn From The Restaurant Business

Before jumping into the particulars on how ARIA Pipeline, Assembler, and Config tackle automation, let’s recap what is meant by “automation.” Automation in the DevOps lifecycle exists in 3 stages: Dev stage, DevOps stage, and the Ops stage. For the Dev stage, we’re attempting to perform Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CICD) wherein code can be imported by a software developer, merged into an existing code base, unit tested for [Read More…]