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pscheri
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Question about reports and deleted VMs

Hi, I am trying to configure a 30 days scheduled report that includes not only the active VMs at the time of the generation, but also the resources that a non present / non existent VM consumed during the analyzed period.

After deleting a VM from vCenter, by default vROps saves its metrics for 360hrs (in case it returns), in that period of time, I am able to list the VM and its former metrics from "Administration > Environment Overview" but not from the vROps standard inventory.


The question is: Is there any chance of adding this information to a custom report?

In the case of this been possible, How can I present it in relation between the former Resource Pool / VM Folder and the deleted VM?


Thank you in advance!!


Pablo.-

7 Replies
mark_j
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

When a VM is removed from vCenter, it'll be associated to the "Collection Status">"Not Existing" tag and get queued for purge/cleanup per the deleted object global setting. At this point, that resource is on it's way out the door and waiting to get purged. Most reports/views will filter based on collection status to exclude the deleted item. Many of the UI filter/tag lists will not show "Not Existing"  as a valid filter, with exception of the Environment Overview section. You won't see any relationships as those no longer exist. You can't create a report based on past object relationships, only current. Also, based on everything I've tested thus far you can also not include "Not Existing" resources in Views/Reports as of v6.0.1. You may be able to with a widget if you can find one that permit the tag filter "not existing".

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pscheri
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Mark, thank you for your answer, do you thing this will be possible in future release? I think this feature would be really useful given the powerful the new report engine is in 6.x.

Thank you again!

Pablo.-

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mark_j
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

You're the first person I've seen wanting to do this, so I'm not sure this type of functionality is very high in the to-do list. I think the fact that you want to report on VMs that have been deleted and essentially don't exist anymore limits the use cases and audiences of that type of functionality. If we kept some historical meta-data separately from the purged performance/metric data, I could see more of a use case for it.

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Souad90
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm looking for the same thing, in fact, knowing how many VMs have been deleted or added is really important. it's unfortunate that vRops can give futur data and not the past one.

pscheri
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi, we were able to do this by consuming the API. There is a config in the global settings called "Deleted Objects" that can be modified to retain the data for those deleted objects:

https://pubs.vmware.com/vrealizeoperationsmanager-62/topic/com.vmware.vcom.core.doc/GUID-DA64FC4D-A6...

The problem is that only retains the name and some useful metric, but those objects lose all hierarchical relationship. This means that you can not query something like "give me all the deleted objects under the XXX Resource Pool", but if you have a good prefix or suffix to identify your VMs, you can query something like "give me all VMs starting with Client-01- even the deleted ones".

Hope this helps.

Pablo.-

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HealthIsWhy
Contributor
Contributor

Forgive me for having to ask, but what do you mean by "consuming the API"?

This is something that we have spent a lot of time trying to do.

Being able to see these objects within the inventory explorer proves that you can query something to show newly added machines and deleted machines.  Why can't we use those things within view and reports?

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ASavener2
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

For what it's worth, we get this information from vRealize Business.  (Resources consumed by decomm'd VMs.)

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