vCenter Operations Manager - What's new in 5.0.2?

VMware released a minor update for vCenter Operations Manager yesterday evening.  The 5.0.2 release contains some bug fixes as well as enhancements for those using the custom UI in the vApp or the standalone version of the product (i.e. Enterprise or Enterprise Plus customers).  There's also a critical security fix for the vApp as well as a fix for support bundles.

Some items of interest -

A new Text widget has been created to allow personalization of the custom dashboards.  You can display plain, unformatted text or HTML from a URL or file.  Below I show an HTML configured Text widget to provide up to date weather forecasts on my dashboard.  KB 2030076 has details on configuring the Text widget.

Mashup charts widget now has three buttons to filter alerts (only active, only inactive or all alerts).  Also, there's more detail on the pop-ups when hovering over an alert.

By the way, this applies to the vSphere UI as well - check out the Operations > Events tab...

You can now configure hint text for KPI alerts.  See KB 2021380 for configuring.


The Alert widget now shows all children of the selected resource, where previously only first level decedents were shown.

You can now configure complex alert rules that evaluate multiple conditions on related resources. The example included with the update (vmware-vcops/user/conf/analytics/multi-level-alert-rules.xml) shows how to format the rule.  Basically, this allows you to create alerts based on a combination of hard thresholds (HT) and dynamic thresholds (DT).


Other enhancements include -

• Weighted metric groups 
• Skip resources for health rollup
• Prioritize threshold checking over Dynamic Threshold calculation

If you are already running the 5.0 or 5.0.1 vApp, you only need to download the VMware-vcops-5.0.2-770497.pak file and then update your vApp using the Admin UI (using the Update tab).  Be sure to shut down your vApp and take a snapshot before applying the update!

For the standalone version, you will need either the .bin or .exe file depending on your OS and then install using the "reinstall" option.  See the release notes for more detail.