VRO/VCO workflow reporting??

[Dean3]

Hi everyone,

So, I'm running VRO workflows manually and I am wondering are there any workflow reporting solutions available that are more user friendly (like any VRO plugins etc...) . Maybe this sort of thing be done through vRA perhaps using vRO rest api to get workflow information? What might be the best solution to present this information?

Any ideas or opinions would be hugely appreciated.

Cheers,

Dean

[tschoergez]

Can you elaborate more on what information the reports should contain?

If you run vRO 6 (there is is in beta) or vRO7, have a look at the new controlcenter, it has a lot of really nice showback pages about worklow execution, failure rates, ...

Cheers,

Joerg

[Dean3]

Thanks very much for the reply. Apologies Joerg, I should have been more specific. I am using vRO 5.5.2 and vRA 6.2 currently and unable to upgrade to 6 or 7 at this moment of time due to customer requirements.

The control centre looks great though, nice slick UI and could serve my purposes once I upgrade.

Are there any similar solutions for vRO 5.5?? The information the reports would contain are workflow status, workflow ID, name... execution times, performance metrics (failure rates..), information on actions when they execute, information of sub workflows and user specific data provided by functionality of workflows. I know I could just system.log desired information, and probably pull that from vRO database but representing the data in clear, user friendly manner is the thing I am after. I don't want users to look through vRO console logs, tracing information.

Would it better to do this through vRA, call workflows there? Pull back the data from vRO? Only issue is reporting, in vRA I think the workflow form has to be submitted first, then get request information afterwards. It's not really what I am after...looking for instantaneous reporting while workflow runs.

Cheers,

Dean

[cdecanini_]

There are a couple of different ways to achieve this:

• Use the javascript API with iterating through workflowTokens for a given sample period. Then you have to decide on how to output the report. This could be an HTML file written to a share to be used by a web server or attached to an email of the person requesting the report.
• Use SQL queries on the vRO database to do the same. You can then create a web page that run these queries live and report with graphs.

Or wait you get access to vRO 7 and as an option interface it with Log Insight to get all kind of reports and provide access to the reports without providing access to vRO control center.

[tschoergez]

In addition to the strategies Christophe mentioned, you can also get the workflow token details via vRO's REST API, works best if you have a certain known set of workflows you want to monitor.

Use any web UI framework of you choice, and get the token list from https://yourvroserver:8281/vco/api/workflow/{wf id}/executions.

For 5.5 you might even get this to work...: Wavemaker Integration for vCenter Orchestrator – VMware Labs

[lurims]

Can VMware provide a link or a tab or a view in vRO or even in API, without asking the Worklfow ID?  That will be useful.  These are simple asks.

[tschoergez]

as written above, check the controlcenter API:

https://[Orchestrator]:8283/vco-controlcenter/docs/

The workflow-tokens-controller should give you access to all workflow tokens without need to specify a workflow id.

Alternative check this thread, might fit your needs, too: Canceled and failed workflow report

Joerg