Friday, November 20, 2015

Get A List of vR Ops Available Metrics

When building dashboards, reports or even symptoms and alerts in vRealize Operations Manager 6, it may be helpful to have a handy reference of metrics available in a given instance of vR Ops.  This is dependent on the solutions installed, of course, so this will vary from instance to instance.

Also, with the vRealize Operations Manager 6.1 Endpoint Operations capability, it may be useful to have a list of all metrics available after installing a new solution or plugin (such as SQL or IIS).

I have created a vRealize Orchestrator workflow and action to provide an HTML output of available metrics for a given solution.  In vR Ops API terms, solutions are "adapter kinds" so the workflow input and output uses this nomenclature.  But, they both mean the same thing.

You can download the solution from FlowGrab here.  Sample output below.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Cannot Start a VM - A general system error occurred: Connection refused

The error referenced in the title was one I ran into today while trying to start some VMs.  I finally found a KB somewhat related to this issue and the workaround did the trick for me.

Basically, the vCenter Workflow Manager service had stopped on my vCenter server.  In my case, I'm running the 6.0.0 vApp so I had to open an SSH session and enter the following:

shell.set --enabled true
shell
service-control --status vmware-vpx-workflow
   (this command confirmed the service was stopped)
service-control --start vmware-vpx-workflow

Once running, I was able to start VMs again from vCenter.

Not sure why this was so hard to find in a web search but hopefully the search engines will pick up this blog post and save people some time!

See also:

VMware KB: VMware NSX for vSphere 6.x Controller deployment fails the error: Failed to power on VM NSX Controller
VMware KB: Stopping, starting, or restarting VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 services