I have a daily report that lists powered-off machines. At any given time there are machines in my environment that are powered-off for legitimate reasons (e.g. replaced and awaiting decommission), but the purpose of the report is to identify machines that are no longer needed and should be deleted.
Occasionally there are machines in the the report that no longer exist (they were deleted from disk in vCenter). Also, the report sometimes contains machines that are actually powered on.
Has anyone experienced this issue?
I ultimately resolved this problem by deleting the non-existent machines out of vROPS, via Inventory Explorer.
You could experience this if the data you're using to display the view isn't using the appropriate transform. So, just as an example, if you powered on a VM 3 minutes ago and ran the report, the data collected may not have seen the new state; or you aren't using the "last" transform which asks for the last value collected. Check your view and see how these metrics and properties are being displayed.
The phantom machines will be there until the deletion period set in your policy expires
I ultimately resolved this problem by deleting the non-existent machines out of vROPS, via Inventory Explorer.