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VCF Operations (formerly Aria Operations or vRealize Operations – vROPS) is a capable and valuable component of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) solution, which maintains continual awareness of your environment’s availability, performance, and configuration. That said, you may find that during scheduled change windows, you may find that Operations continues to dispatch alert notifications, which can become burdensome as messages fill your inbox. Luckily, Operations ships with a method to natively manage Maintenance Mode for monitored objects. This is separate from Maintenance Mode in vCenter Server and only pertains to pausing data collection against Operations Objects. In short, enabling/disabling Maintenance Mode within Operations will only suspend/resume data collection within Operations.
Although the new user interface provided in VCF Operations 8.18 is a bit more refined, the location of the “Inventory” (or “Inventory Management”) page has been relocated, which took me a few minutes to find. As usual, you can certainly toggle Maintenance Mode in Operations using the API, but we will not cover that in this article.
So where has the “Inventory” page gone?
Locate the Inventory Management Page
First, browse to your VCF Operations instance and authenticate as needed. If you already have a VCF Operations window/tab open, simply click on the “Home” button, located within the left-side navigation.
Click on the “Operations” menu item, located within the left-side navigation. Notice that multiple new menu items appear beneath.
Click on the “Configurations” menu item, located near the bottom of the list.
Locate the “Others” menu heading, which may require scrolling down the page. Click on the “Inventory Management” button. The “Inventory Management” page is very familiar in comparison to previous versions.
Locate the Object(s) for which you intend to enable/disable Maintenance Mode. Click on the first Object, then use SHIFT + Click to select a range of Objects or CTRL + Click to select additional objects which are not in a range.
Enable Maintenance Mode
Click on the “Start Maintenance” button, located along the top ribbon. A dialog box appears, which allows the Operations User to define the Maintenance Schedule.
- “I will return to end maintenance myself”
- The selected Object(s) will remain in Maintenance Mode until manually disabled. The only caveat to this option is that the Operations User must remember to disable Maintenance Mode at the conclusion of scheduled activities.
- “End Maintenance in _____ minutes”
- Specify a numeric value (measured in minutes, of course). This option is basically a timer: once the Operations User clicks on the “Ok” button, Operations will enable Maintenance Mode for the Object(s), then automatically resume data collection after the specified number of minutes has passed. This is ideal if you have a good idea of when a scheduled activity will conclude.
- “End Maintenance on _______”
- Using the date picker, specify the date when Operations Maintenance Mode should resume collecting data for the selected Object(s). Note that you do not specify a time in this field, only a date. This is ideal if a scheduled activity is expected to conclude at the end of the week (i.e., Friday) and you would like to resume collecting data first thing Monday morning (12:00 AM). If you want to be more granular with the date and time, consider using “Maintenance Schedules” instead of “Inventory Management” – we’ll cover that another time.
Once you have selected one of the options above, click on the “Ok” button to immediately enable Operations Maintenance Mode on the selected Object(s).
Notice the “Collection State” icon(s) will toggle from a green foreground color to gray, indicating that data collection is no longer active. Note that all Active Alerts will be silently closed or reset as a result.
Disable Maintenance Mode
Click on the “End Maintenance” button, located along the top ribbon. This is an immediate change.
Notice the “Collection State” icon(s) will toggle from a gray foreground color to green, indicating that data collection is active. Note that it may take a couple of minutes for the “Collection Status” icons to follow suit.
